


Partition

by vertual



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Character Swap, Angst, Character Death, Character Undeath, Everyone Has Issues, F/M, Literally an Alternate Universe, Post-The Final Problem, Pre-Relationship, Sherlock Holmes Is Not Okay
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:26:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 23,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24594505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vertual/pseuds/vertual
Summary: Sherlock Holmes struggles to keep himself right in a world where everything is wrong. In another place, Will Holmes does the same.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Molly Hooper
Comments: 86
Kudos: 86





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Kenz, who took the first steps four years ago before moving on to greener fandoms.
> 
> 2019-2020 SAMFA winner for best drama and runner up for best other AU/UA in the M/E category. Those are for you too.

Molly stares into the mirror. Her reflection stares back.

Nothing wrong with that. It’s perfectly normal to look at oneself in a mirror, right?

Except Molly doesn’t think that she looks like herself.

Regular Molly is happy. Regular Molly doesn't spend this much time standing in front of a mirror. Regular Molly doesn't look this frayed at the edges, this tired, this worn down, this… _different_.

It’s been a long time since she's seen Regular Molly.

Her eyes wander from the cold glass.

This particular mirror is connected to a dresser. On top the dresser lay a bottle of perfumed lotion, some jewelry, Toby’s half-chewed toy, a scattering of hair clips and ties, and a small pile of newspaper clippings.

She hadn’t meant to collect articles about Sherlock. She just sort of _started_ , like how people suddenly decide to build boats in glass bottles or collect coins. It isn't a hobby, per se. She liked reading about his cases, how other people perceived them from John’s blog. And Sherlock always complained about having to see his own face in the papers.

A clear, colourful picture of Sherlock when he was a teenager is tucked into the top left corner of the mirror. He would always smile a bit whenever he saw it, but he'd always pretend he didn’t. He'd quite possibly deny it until the day he died.

She hasn't seen him for months, now.

He isn’t avoiding her. He isn't in another country, or enjoying a mountainous workload. He’s just _gone_. Disappeared, like mist on a hot summer day. Completely gone, and nobody knows where he is now. With what she knows, he could well be lying in a ditch, drowned in the mud.

Molly digs her nails into the wood of the dresser, inhaling deeply as tears scratch at the back of her throat. She squeezes her eyes shut, counts down from ten, and lets out a heavy sigh. Turns to the window, covered in a brightly patterned set of curtains, pink and yellow and blue shining out among the flowers printed on the fabric. He always said the curtains were terrible but were well-suited to her tastes.

She isn't even aware that someone has come into her room until a timid, wavering voice, laced with warmth and worry calls out, “Molly?”

A shaky breath, then a reply. “In here.”

Soft footsteps approach, carrying the sound of Toby’s soft purr. A quiet thump reaches her ears as the cat leaps from the individual’s arms before prancing away.

A hand tentatively touches her back. “Few and far in between these days,” the voice says gently, so familiar yet so different.

“I miss him.” She feels incredibly selfish as soon as the words leave her mouth, but she relaxes as the hand on her back moves up and down in a comforting motion.

“I understand.”

Molly swallows hard and turns to wrap her arms around his waist. The hand that isn’t on her back goes to her hair, the fingers exploring the mess she hasn’t yet brushed out, and he pulls her into a tight hug. Murmurs of comfort are mumbled against her crown, and she can feel the shaking breaths that tell her he’s trying not to break too.

He’s in a worse situation than she is. Everyone here only has one person to miss; he’s lost his whole life.

They hold each other for a long time, until he pulls back and places his hands on her cheeks. He looks so sad, but he smiles for her anyway. His face is softer, his eyes warmer, his entire existence free of the scars and trauma of the person he’s replaced. Despite essentially being the same man, he is so, so unlike what she remembers.

He gestures for her to lie down and she moves to her bed, burying herself under the blankets as he tapes up today’s article on the right side of the mirror, under the last one. The door closes a minute later and she looks to the mirror, the reflection of her room having become that much smaller with the paper covering the sides.

“The Mystery of the Missing Detective” reads the newest headline.

Life goes on.


	2. Chapter 2

Sherlock Holmes trudges up the stairs to flat B, shucking his coat and scarf on the way and hanging them on the back of the door when he enters the main room. He runs his hands through his windblown hair in an attempt to tame the mess it has become, soon realising he has no reason to do so and dropping his arms. He stalks through the kitchen toward his bedroom, giving the door a light kick to shut it before stripping down to the skin and tugging on the pyjama bottoms left at the foot of the bed.

The case had come to him as a six and had escalated to a nine not long after his arrival on the scene, only ending after an incredibly long foot chase wherein he was nearly hit by a car. And a lorry. And another car. And a cyclist. A definite ten to conclude, if only for the repeated near-hospitalisations and the fact that the young woman he was chasing was meant to be in a leg cast, in a wheelchair. His legs and lungs burn still, but at least he got some much-needed fresh air, something that Mrs. Hudson hasn’t left him alone about for quite some time.

Sherlock makes a point of ignoring the little red lights on his alarm clock telling him how late, or rather, how early it is. The sheets crackle when he pulls them down, and with a frown and a grumble he fluffs the static out of them before throwing himself into the center of the bed and pulling the blankets up to his chin.

He’s asleep before his face hits the pillow.

* * *

**A short while later, a long distance away**

Were it at all possible for a facial expression to make a sound, one could say that Mycroft Holmes is currently frowning quite loudly. His eyes change focus repeatedly, his attention moving from the computer monitor on his left to the static chamber in the center of the room and back again as he calculates.

The chamber, essentially a hollow glass sphere twelve inches in diameter propped into a rubberised globe stand, appears as unexciting as ever. The charts on the computer in front of him show that this is far from reality.

Mycroft lets out a deep breath and leans forward on his elbows, resting his chin on top of his clasped hands as he continues to look back and forth at his experiment. It had been silent for weeks. How had it become active so suddenly?

“Eurus,” he calls calmly, restraining himself from rolling his eyes at the sound of two sets of heels approaching from behind, professor and student. It doesn’t matter, he supposes; Anthea will be equally interested. And it was, after all, his own mistake for selecting an assistant so determined to learn all the nooks and crannies of the operation.

“Those are massive numbers,” the professor murmurs, placing a hand on the back of Mycroft’s chair and peering at the computer with curiosity. She’s so close he can see her profile in his periphery. If he wasn’t accustomed to seeing her round face in his space he might have pushed his chair away. As it is, he remains still, awaiting the question he knows is coming. “Where are we?”

“Seven.”

“How many do you normally count?” Anthea asks from his other side, possibly looking for some sign of life from the chamber. It is coming, but how soon none of them can yet say.

“Nine is the average,” Eurus explains, moving back to speak to her student face to face. “The number of rounds is dependent on the time between drops, and then the speed of the rounds is dependent on the time between the last drop and its return. There hasn’t been a drop reported in the past few months, but the last one had a return of six days, so…”

“The spirals have the right acceleration,” Mycroft supplies. “The formula for the iterations is more of a complex guess that just barely accounts for a non-return, so the estimate for this event should be closer to…” His eyes narrow as he does a fast count of the numbers on the screen as the eighth round begins. “I would say sixteen.”

“Looks about right,” the professor agrees.

“Do you know where it’s going to be?” the student asks, concerned. “Or when? Or who will be dropped?”

“No, we don’t. Not until after.”

“After what, though?”

Mycroft and Eurus leave the question to hang in the air, simply watching the monitor and the chamber in equal bouts as the static rounds push ever closer to the estimated sixteen iterations. Anthea’s heels begin clicking quietly against the tile floor in her short pacing, and a glance to his right tells Mycroft she is staring intently at the static chamber, awaiting the signal that the event has occurred. She turns her phone over and over in her hands as she watches, a habit she adopted in favour of chewing her nails.

Just before the fourteenth round reaches its end, a short flash of bright blue light bursts from the chamber, immediately followed by the sharp crackle of static. Anthea jumps back slightly, her quick gasp coinciding with the digits on the computer monitor spiking for an instant before falling back to zero.

“Clock it,” Eurus commands. “Anthea, come with me. I’ll show you how to locate the event.”

The two women clatter toward the professor’s desk, and Mycroft busies himself with his task. He sends the satellite time and spectrum point to Eurus’s cloud and sets to work on resetting his system and altering the iteration equation for the umpteenth time.

 _Perhaps it is just chance_ , he thinks, feeling a small amount of sympathy for the person who will soon awake in an alien world.

* * *

**The next morning, not quite where we began**

Molly rolls over with a huff, inhaling deeply and letting out the air with a drawn-out sigh. The groan that escapes her as she tumbles out of bed is nowhere near attractive, but it isn’t like anybody is around to hear it. If Toby judged her, he couldn’t verbalise it.

Yawning and scratching at her messy morning hair, she trudges out of the bedroom with her pyjama bottoms catching under her heels. She mumbles a good morning to the striped feline lounging on the back of the sofa, stumbling slightly when she encounters the closed bathroom door. She frowns at it, wondering if a breeze closed it during the night, and blinks tiredly before going for the handle.

The instant the door opens she is startled wide awake by a yell from inside the room, her eyes snapping open while the rest of her jumps back. There’s only enough time for her to glance over the lithe frame, bare as the sky is blue, and for her tired mind to put two and two together before her body is automatically put into motion. She immediately slams the door and stumbles back in surprise, her cheeks burning red at the knowledge that had she not shut the door she would have been face-to-face with a very naked man who could only have been one person.

“What are you doing here?” she yells to the idiot in her bathroom. The image of a shapely bum presents itself at the front of Molly’s mind, and she rubs at her eyes furiously, trying to scrub it away. “Haven’t I taught you to warn me if you show up in the middle of the night? And to lock the bloody door if you know I’m here?”

“Why should I if I didn’t know you were bloody here?” he snaps through the door, just before it opens and he takes a step out, thankfully wrapped in a towel. “Could have done me the favour of telling me to move from the sofa to the bed.”

“It’s _my_ bed and this is _my_ –” She stops dead before she can finish her sentence, noticing not proudly that Sherlock looks rather different. Specifically… “What did you do to your hair?”

“I washed it?” He looks at her like a madwoman before stepping back to look at his definitely shorter, definitely more auburn hair in the bathroom mirror. The side-eye he gives her is a little bit offensive, like he thinks she might be high out of her mind. _Takes one to know one_ , she thinks to herself.

“It’s _gone_ ,” she says, pointing vaguely at him. It’s not that she doesn’t like it, but it’s Sherlock, and the dark, occasionally wild mop is one of his most recognisable features. Even damp from the shower it still looks fairly fluffy, but it is honestly a bit weird to be able to see every bit of his ears. “And it’s lighter.”

Instead of explaining himself, he rolls his eyes and steps out of the bathroom, walking past her to the bedroom. “Honestly, Jane, for someone who comments on it so often I figured you’d notice when I cut it three weeks ago.”

She wants to stomp her foot at the frustrating man, tell him not to call her by her middle name just to bother her and to remind him that she saw him two _days_ ago and his hair didn’t look like that, but the moment he turns his back to her, she freezes. Completely.

She prided herself on being calm the first time she saw all the scars on Sherlock’s back after he came back from the dead. It was long after his return, after Tom, after the fake Moriarty, when he came by to do exactly what she’d demanded of him that day in the lab. He had literally apologised on his knees and then didn’t leave that night, throwing on some pyjama bottoms he’d hidden away in her wardrobe and falling asleep on the sofa barely after seven o’clock. She hadn’t noticed until just before she went to bed, checking on him out of habit and seeing that he’d simply curled up and dropped off. But he’d foregone a shirt in the warmth of her living room and her eyes were drawn to all the marks, each making her feel more sick than the last. She’d dealt with enough, though, and she managed to hold it together. No crying herself to sleep. No dreaming either.

This, this is wrong. His scars can’t have just disappeared. And the one on his abdomen, the one from the bullet. She hadn’t even looked before, but she gets the chance when he steps back out of the room with a glare. She glances down briefly and confirms her suspicion. A very real sense of fear pulses in her as she blinks hard, trying to look him in the eye but feeling almost intuitively that this cannot be Sherlock.

“What did you do to my clothes?” he asks, stopping in front of her with his hands on his hips.

“They’re where I left them,” she manages, voice coming out in barely a whisper.

Her tone must have startled him because his annoyance dissipates in a second, replaced by something bordering on concern. It isn’t a look she’s seen often on his face, and it looks more than a little wrong. The silence stretches on as he continues to stare at her, his face changing again to something that more or less mirrors her own frayed nerves this morning.

“You’re not Jane Hooper,” he says with wide eyes.

Molly shakes her head, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. “I don’t remember telling you it’s my middle name, but I suppose you’ve probably looked at all my ID....”

A more familiar expression falls on his face, like he’s running through the nonsensical events of the past three minutes inside his head. His eyes make a quick exploration of the flat around the pair of them before returning to her, looking at her like she has two heads.

“What’s going on?” she whispers, stepping even farther back. If he’s high, or some evil doppelganger, or...

The man in front of her seems to notice the intense awkwardness of being a stranger standing in her flat in nothing but a towel, his ears turning bright red and his mouth opening and closing trying to form a sentence. It reminds her of herself, honestly. Finally, he swallows thickly, pursing his lips and trying to look anywhere but at her.

“Could you maybe give me some clothes before we have this conversation?"

* * *

**Where we began, but somewhere else**

“I’d like to speak to Mycroft Holmes, please…. Yes, I’m aware he’s busy, but this is important. Just tell him it’s Hooper, I’m sure he’ll drop his pencil and come to the phone. _Thank_ you.”

The line clicks to signal she is being put on hold. She leans against the open door, her free arm resting in the crook of the one holding her mobile to her ear, fingers tapping impatiently at the bland beeping that plays in her ear. Honestly, she’s found enough drops for him, she should have had a direct line to the so-called expert by now.

“Miss Hooper,” the voice greets, dry from a lack of sleep. He stayed up to do his calculations, then. What a devoted scientist. “What can I do for you?”

“No need for formalities. I know you haven’t found the drop yet.”

Holmes sighs on the other end of the line, probably pinching the bridge of his nose in an attempt to relieve the pressure that his spectacles have been putting there for the past seven hours at least.

“Stop looking.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, stop looking.” Jane rolls her eyes at having to repeat herself. “Your brother was the drop.”

“How do you know?”

“Because his equivalent is in my bed. Come and fetch him, please, I have work to do today.”

At that, she disconnects the call and pockets her phone. She could have saved them all hours of their lives had she decided to go to bed last night instead of staying up and working as Holmes had done, but there’s no fixing that now. She stands in her room in her wrinkled clothes, watching with some interest as the mop-haired creature stirs under her blankets.

“Wakey wakey,” she teases, quickly rewarded with the sight of him sitting up so fast that he has to blink away the spots that form in front of his eyes. He squints at her, looking rather annoyed, and she simply raises a brow in response.

“What are you doing here?” he demands in a sleepy rumble that doesn’t have a null effect on her heart rate. She keeps herself composed as always, refusing to let any emotional response show on her face.

“In a marvelous twist of events,” she says, “I live here. Welcome to a new world, William.”


	3. Chapter 3

Sherlock never pretended to be known for his patience, especially when his brother was involved, but if this is some elaborate prank designed specially for him, he doubts Mycroft would bother to be a part of it. So when the man himself not only shows up at 221B but also assists in preparing a pot of tea, Sherlock allows himself to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the “new world” Molly mentioned – before scowling at him and insisting she be called Jane – could be just that.

 _Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth._ He can’t actually refute it with science and the impossible already seems to have manifested in a polite and bespectacled Mycroft, so how could he say anything? Maybe he was drugged during the night. Maybe it’s a very, very realistic dream. Maybe it’s all truly happening, and therefore, he goes along with the madness of it all.

“So,” Mycroft says, placing the tray on the coffee table and preparing three cups of tea, “what has Miss Hooper explained so far?”

“That I am not to leave the seat up.” Sherlock only moves to accept the cup and saucer offered to him, placing them on his leg while he leans against the arm of the sofa, showing off his lack of enthusiasm with his cheek resting on his fist.

“Mm, amusing.” The other Holmes waits for Not Molly to turn the desk chair around and sit before handing her a cup, taking his own to sit in the armchair adjacent to Sherlock's place on the sofa. “I assure you, this is not a joke. Most all equivalents have a hard time believing the concept and adjusting to it. There’s no shame in ignorance when the study of these events appears limited to very few worlds.”

“Few worlds,” Sherlock repeats coolly, rolling his eyes. “I’m not an astronomer, but I’m fairly certain this is still Earth.”

“Oh, it is. But you see, the multiverse theory has been proven true here, and these events – transdimensional events, TDEs, colloquially called drops – are a discovery that came hand in hand with the proof of multiple universes.

“Whether each universe is infinite or not, they all exist in their own sort of bubbles. The bubbles don’t necessarily contain the universes themselves, but at the very least their dimensions. The time and space of each universe assuredly exist in each bubble. Theoretically, they can all be different sizes and shapes, and they move. Bounce around, so to speak.”

“And let me guess: when two bubbles collide, these _TDEs_ are the result.”

“Quite so!” Mycroft turns to smile widely at Not Molly, who looks as uncomfortable as Sherlock feels. Mycroft, smiling. Ugh. “I do enjoy the interactive ones.”

“He’s sparing himself from hearing you explain it in detail,” Not Molly drawls. Sherlock rolls his eyes behind his cup of surprisingly nice tea. Seeing any version of Mycroft being one-upped is fun, but he doesn’t like _her_ doing it.

“Yes, well, unfortunately for him I’m going to explain it anyway.” Mycroft turns back to Sherlock, mostly unfazed. Sherlock sees little of the Mycroft he is familiar with in this scientist.

“Go ahead, then.”

“You’re correct in your assumption. It would take a very long time to explain why it is, in the vastness of both universes, that these events occur so often on Earth that we have a name for them and a system to attempt to deal with them, but the short form is that the links appear to favour the electromagnetic consistencies of the human brain. When these bumps occur, it is as if the connecting areas are the north and south poles of two different magnets. Earth attracted to Earth, down to the still unexplained specificity of picking up a person and dropping them in the exact same place they were before, in their clothing and even under blankets, but in a completely different universe.”

Sherlock raises a brow at the man’s complete willingness to admit his ignorance in his field of expertise; so very unlike Mycroft.

“So it happens when the people are asleep.”

“Yes. We believe that the state of the brain in sleep leaves the body more open to connection.”

“What about people who fall asleep with their phone in their pocket?”

“We’ve not yet encountered such an occurrence,” Mycroft continues, not only retaining his patience but seeming to enjoy the questions. “If the hypotheses of static magnetism hold true, it’s likely the phones themselves cause the connection to hop over the person. But so far, no event has had a drop carrying a mobile device.”

“I assume the same goes for pacemakers, oxygen machines, digital watches–”

“Shut. Up,” Jane groans from her seat. “He’s only going to like the exposition more the more questions you ask so do us all a favour and _stop asking them_.”

If she can see through his needless curiosity, Sherlock doesn’t doubt that Jane can read his surprised pause. She gives no hint of caring about it, only scowling at him, daring him to open his mouth again, before turning back to Mycroft expectantly.

“What’s he meant to do?” she asks dryly.

“Well,” Mycroft considers, turning back to him, “you can’t be given access to Will’s place of work, as you claim you don’t have the qualifications. My student assistant will have the responsibility of making sure Will’s home and cat are taken care of should you prefer to stay elsewhere during your time here.”

“How long should that be?” Sherlock dares to ask, glancing at Jane and seeing no indication that she is going to stop this question. “I _can_ get back, can’t I?”

“Oh, yes, of course. But these things are very complicated. The chance of you and Will being the victims of this transdimensional event is what brings each of you back to your respective worlds.”

Sherlock feels himself blink stupidly. “I don’t understand.”

Before Mycroft can take a breath to respond, Jane leans forward to pull his attention, placing her empty cup on the table. “The correlation of your brainwaves is what pulled the bubbles together on you,” she explains, using her hands to illustrate. “You and Will were pegged as drops when your frequencies coincided. Another coincidence of frequencies will be what pulls the bubbles back together to drop you both back home.”

“Well that’s stupid. Who thought of that? Something as simple as a matching brainwave should happen more often than not.”

“You’d think so.” Sitting back in her chair and crossing her legs and then her arms, Jane turns back to Mycroft and says, “I’ll hold onto him, if that’s all right. If he’s at all what I expect him to be, he’ll be very helpful for my pressing caseload.”

“You did say you were busy.” Mycroft places his cup on the tea tray, standing and donning his coat. “I’ll be on my way. I do have my own work to do, and I’m sure you can answer any more questions he may have. Anthea will have his kit this afternoon.”

Sherlock watches as Mycroft leaves the flat, only turning back to Jane at the sound of the front door closing.

“Kit?”

“People tend to dislike the idea of using someone else’s toothbrush and wearing their pants. You’ll have that for free as long as you’re here. You can probably get away with wearing his clothes since you seem fine with his t-shirt.”

Sherlock looks down at the faded black shirt Jane tossed at him before Mycroft’s arrival. She could be right, but he did turn it inside-out before putting it on, so he supposes it’ll depend on whether Will’s clothes are itchy or not.

“How long will I be here?”

“Good question.” Jane throws him an ironic wink that he does not appreciate. “Let’s just say you’d do well to get comfortable. It can be anywhere from a day to a month.”

“A month?!” He nearly overturns his tea, managing to steady it and place his cup with the others before rounding back on Jane. “I can’t be here a month.”

“If Will can be _there_ for a month, you can be _here_. It’s hardly a tragedy.”

“If there’s any way to contact–”

“There isn’t.” She signals the end of the discussion by loading the tea tray and returning it to the kitchen, leaving him alone in the flat that already doesn’t feel like his own.

When she comes back into the main room she continues to ignore him, turning her chair back around and plucking her laptop from the desk to stalk over to his chair – _her_ chair. She drops down onto it heavily, stress evident in the lines on her face. He has to wonder how much of Molly she has in her at all. Of course they are technically the same person, but this person, Jane Hooper, has his life. She is the consulting detective. She is the one strangers seek out for help solving their problems. He doesn’t bother to ask if William Holmes has Molly Hooper’s life. _His home and his cat. His qualifications_. Of course he does.

“Does Mycroft run this whole… _thing_ himself?” Sherlock asks, keeping his voice quiet and calm in an attempt to avoid irritating his host more than necessary. A social cue he learned from all the times he’s hidden away at Molly’s flat.

“It’s a whole network. He’s second in command here. Works with professors and their students. Eurus is the boss. She and Mycroft are the world’s leading experts on TDEs, after their parents passed. Will’s the odd duckling who went into pathology instead.”

Sherlock feels his stomach drop at her words. Eurus, responsible for a massive field of study with their brother. Their parents, not just off in America for a holiday, but gone permanently. The longer he thinks about it the deeper it will cut, so he takes a grounding breath and shoves it to the back of his mind.

“You seem friendly with them. Do you help them find their lost souls?”

“Only occasionally. TDEs aren’t just centered in London; they’re global. There are teams around the world who watch for events in their areas. I’m friendly with the Holmeses through Will, Will through the work. No doubt the relationship I have with him is similar to the one you have with your Molly Hooper.”

 _My Molly Hooper._ How easy it’s already becoming to separate the heartfelt woman he knows in his own life from the colder version in front of him. He tries not to let himself wonder how Jane and Will compare to himself and Molly when it comes to that uncomfortable ache he often feels in his chest. There’s no way Jane and Will have gone through what he and Molly have experienced. No faked suicide, no life or death phone call, no forced confessions, no awkward agreement that they aren’t in a place to start anything but they can see how things go. No going home alone and wishing she could just be there now that he understands.

Looking at this woman doesn’t feel the same. It’s like examining a broken version of Molly that had sharp pieces of himself grafted on. He doesn’t like her, and it’s already clear to him that it is because she possesses little of Molly’s warmth. She is… wrong.

Another thing to stow away. He has to focus on what he has. If he’ll be here up to a month, he should try to spend his time effectively.

“What did you want me to help you with?”

For a moment Sherlock thinks Jane might have gone back to ignoring him, but after she opens her laptop and logs in, she stands up and brings the computer over. She places it where the tea tray was minutes before, stepping back and settling her hands on her hips while he taps through her open emails. Her many, recently received, long emails.

He raises his brows at the sheer amount of work, some of it looking rather interesting at first glance. This is more his style.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that was mostly exposition, but don't worry, plot is coming.
> 
> Thank you, as always, for comments and kudos. I thrive off them.


	4. Chapter 4

Molly picks up her phone to look at the clock, counting nearly an hour she’s been waiting patiently for her guest to start talking. As soon as he came out of her room in Sherlock’s leftover pyjamas and sat down at her table, he seemed more interested in staring at the notches in the wood than sharing any words. His large hands are wrapped around the floral coffee mug she reserves for Sherlock when he decides to be rude. She expected him to break character when she handed it to him, hoping for a scowl or a flinch of some kind, but he simply thanked her and went off to space.

His first sign of life comes when he tries to drink from the mug he already emptied, frowning at the dregs before setting the mug aside and placing the palms of his hands together on the table.

“Are you going to tell me who you really are now?”

His expression is hard to figure out when he looks at her. Annoyed maybe, or concerned, or confused. Maybe a sum of all three. “William Holmes, specialist registrar at Barts Hospital.”

“That’s _my_ job title and you know it.”

“Your equivalent is a detective. I’m a pathologist.”

“You can’t just pretend to switch lives with someone and then try to convince them you’re telling the truth!” She’s getting frustrated with him very quickly and this is not how she wanted to start her first day off in almost two weeks. Molly pinches the bridge of her nose, trying to breathe deeply to avoid picking up his mug and throwing it at his head.

“I’m not pretending, I swear. My name is Will, and I’m here as the result of a transdimensional event. It’s a scientifically confirmed phenomenon where I’m from. My brother and sister are leading researchers on the subject.”

_You could just believe him_ , her little voice suggests, especially when he mentions the sister almost no one knows about.

“Okay,” she says quietly. “This has been a mad morning. Maybe I’m still conked on the sofa. Maybe I’m dreaming.”

“You’re not dreaming.”

“Fine. Tell me about yourself and how you got here.” She’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now. If it gets too wonky… “I’m going to phone someone to listen, if you don’t mind.”

Will appears a bit wary of the suggestion, but nods anyway. “Who?”

_Good question_. She doesn’t want to call John, that much is obvious. He’d be certain Sherlock is just taking the piss and he’d drag the man to the hospital himself for a drug test. No. It has to be someone who could consider the notion that science fiction could be science fact. If this is a phenomenon that truly does exist, no one has come out with it yet. Not here.

She does have a number written down that she was told only to dial in “extreme situations”. Surely Mycroft Holmes’s brother being replaced by a version of himself from another universe counts?

* * *

Despite her assumption that the press would show up at exactly the worst time, it isn’t hard to sneak Will to Baker Street an hour later. She figures he’ll be only a little more uncomfortable than she is about rooting around Sherlock’s flat while he isn’t there, but he surprises her after she unlocks the front door by jogging right up the stairs.

Mrs. Hudson has to be told something eventually, she decides, glancing down the corridor to the door of flat A before following Will upstairs. She finds him in the kitchen and watches as he opens every cupboard, steeling herself for the moment he gets to the fridge. She’s heard horror stories from John – an entire _head_ – but she wasn’t entirely innocent in those events, and she hopes that part is the same for this version of Sherlock and his version of Molly.

“What are you doing?” she dares to ask when he opens the fridge to a very ordinary-looking stock of leftovers.

“My mum and dad used to run it into us that if you’re not sure you’ll be staying at your equivalent’s home, you _should_ be sure they don’t return to spoiled food.” He turns to her, holding up a small milk jug and a mostly-finished bag of bread. He ties a knot in the bread bag and tosses it in the freezer. Finally, he examines the milk label, looking very much like Sherlock raising a brow at the words DRINK ME written in Sharpie.

“So he knows it’s not the bacterial cultures,” Molly explains weakly.

“Why not just label it when it _is_ cultures?”

Molly shrugs noncommittally and lets Will put the milk down the sink. She then follows him to Sherlock’s bedroom, realising one foot in the door that she’s never actually seen it past a quick glance on her way to the loo. It’s furnished much like the main room, with knick-knacks on bookshelves, walls decorated appropriately to Sherlock down to the table of elements, a couple photographs she doesn’t have time to be curious about, and a bunch of _stuff_ strewn about.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Will croaks, taking in the wardrobe with frog-like eyes. “Does he have normal clothes?”

“Shh!”

Molly holds a hand up to silence him further, stepping out of the room and listening for another sound. She could have sworn she heard the front door, and yes, she definitely hears footsteps on the stairs.

When the knob on the main door rattles slightly, Molly stumbles back into the bedroom, her eyes wide. Why didn’t they make sure the outside door was locked? She didn't know clients still showed themselves up even when it was obvious that Sherlock wasn't in the flat. She hears the clink of keys and change and glances around in a panic. How is she to explain why she’s in 221B, and that Sherlock is gone, and why she’s in 221B while Sherlock is gone?

“Under the bed.” Will’s hand touches her arm and she has to strain to hear his words as he gently tries to pull her backward. “Quickly.”

“Are we really going to hide from John like we’re five?” she hisses, letting him guide her farther into the room.

Will narrows his eyes at her challengingly, and Molly's heart skips a beat. She’s seen that expression many times before on Sherlock's face when he was deliberately being difficult. “Explaining it to you was tough enough,” he replies sharply. “I just want to kit up and go. Now, under the bed.”

Molly opens her mouth, ready to counter, but she is cut off by the sound of the door to the flat finally opening. She makes no more attempts to argue and quickly crawls underneath the far side of Sherlock's bed with his counterpart shuffling in behind her. A hand rests awkwardly on her hip after he pushes her forward a bit, and she can't help but smile slightly at his shyness. Making sure their feet are out of sight is a bit difficult but they manage to do it somehow. Will has managed to get in on an angle, and as such is tucked in close to her side.

It doesn’t take long for Molly to begin to wriggle uncomfortably. The floor is harder than it looks and lying on her stomach is doing her no favours. Beside her, Will grunts quietly, his grip on her hip tightening.

“Stop moving,” he whispers, sounding almost urgent.

“Why?” she mutters stubbornly. To prove her point, she wiggles again, this time a little more obnoxiously.

Will stays frustratingly silent.

A door opens and closes, leaving a serene, silent air outside of the bedroom. Molly breathes a sigh of relief and begins to drag herself to the side.

“What are you doing?” Will pulls her back and holds her tightly against him as she lets loose a curse.

“Getting out! He's gone. We can get back to stealing Sherlock’s things for your holiday,” she says, her tone icy. Again, she tries to move, and she can hear Will growling in frustration under his breath.

“Be quiet.”

“He's gone. Now let me go, you pri–”

A hand clamps over her mouth, and Molly lets out an indignant, muffled snarl.

But she instantly goes still, her eyes wide, when the door to the bedroom opens fully and a pair of shoes appear.

“Sherlock. Seriously. If you're not here…” John trails off, then lets out a sigh. “Could've left a note or something. Can't believe I have to…”

The voice slowly dissolves as John leaves the room, and then the flat, for good this time, it seems.

Finally, Molly twists in Will’s hold to scowl at him in the near darkness. She can see his eyes flitting to look at anything but her face. And is he… blushing? “There,” she says. “ _Now_ he's gone. Can you please let me–”

Oh. Suddenly, Molly's own cheeks burn red at the sensation of something pressed against the side of her thigh.

They stare at each other in silence.

And then, “Are you completely serious right now?”

Will glares at her and shoves her toward the other side of the bed to crawl out. “I told you to stop moving. Just get me out from here.”

Molly can't help but laugh a little when a very red-faced Will makes a beeline for the bathroom, blocking her view of _parts_. He’s out a few minutes later, still rosy, but mercifully sans bulge when he enters the bedroom to help her pilfer.

“It’s like all he has is suits and sweats,” he complains. “Doesn’t he own a single pair of jeans?”

Molly bites her tongue before she can embarrass herself by confirming that she has absolutely seen Sherlock’s bum in jeans. Instead she opens her last drawer, finding what is definitely a stash of stolen uniform pieces from various occupations, including half a dozen of Greg’s police badges.

“I guess you’ll have to go shopping,” she admits, defeatedly shutting the drawer. “I can ask Mycroft to send some extra money over for you to pick up a few things.”

“You think he’d do that?”

“He lives in a castle. He doesn’t care about a few hundred quid.”

“My brother lives in a two-bedroom flat a block away from work.” Will hooks the canvas bag of borrowed items over his shoulder and gestures for Molly to lead the way out of the bedroom. “A castle sounds more Eurus; she always wanted to be like Enya.”

Molly stops dead in her tracks, either at the mention of Eurus or at the kitchen door opening in front of her. She tries to turn and shove Will back into the bedroom when he steps on her heel, but it’s too late.

“I thought I heard someone else!” Mrs. Hudson coos, smiling brightly at the two of them. Both Molly and Will give a chorus of “No no no no no”s when Mrs. Hudson sticks her head back out the door and calls, “John, they’re up here!”

Will lets out a strangled noise at the footsteps coming back up the stairs and Molly remains frozen in place. Having just avoided a round of confusing explanations for Will’s presence, they’ve dropped themselves right into it, twofold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't want to say updates will happen regularly from here, but I'm definitely trying to reach a goal of at least 400 words a day, so I'm hoping to get the rest of this story out in good time! It's going to get more fun from here. If not for you, then definitely for me.
> 
> As always, thank you for comments and kudos! You keep me thriving.


	5. Chapter 5

“So how is she enjoying being an absentee landlady?”

“Mrs. Hudson?”

“Mm.”

Jane glances back at the door to 221A with a shrug before following him through the foyer. “I hope she’s having fun. I’m not even paying rent, just putting the money to maintaining the building. And if she eventually dies, she’s already told me she’s leaving me the deed.”

 _If_. Sherlock grins as he steps out the front door into the cool November air and sees the taxi waiting. Knowing Mrs. Hudson is as unstoppable here as she is back home is a comfort. Strange that her husband is still alive and apparently never ran a drug cartel, but as long as Mrs. Hudson is happy and safe, Sherlock is content.

He’s learned remarkably little about this world, mostly due to Jane’s exceptional ability to keep him occupied these past few days. They’ve been splitting her latest caseload more or less down the middle, he taking the clients who visit Baker Street and she taking the cases that require her elsewhere. She rolled her eyes when he suggested she’s a consulting detective as well, arguing that while she does consult for the police on occasion, she is a _private_ detective who is hired first and foremost by _private citizens_. Then she packed up a shiny DSLR and left for the evening to sit in a fire escape and wait for a man’s wife to show up at his business partner’s home for a cash drop.

This is the first time he’s left Baker Street since he arrived. Letting himself be busy with the work has left him sleeping on the sofa in 221B despite Jane’s repeated insistence he go to Will’s to dote on his cat, Phoebe. Anthea – whose name is actually Anthea here, not Andrea, he learned – brought him his kit and a small suitcase of Will’s clothes a couple hours after Mycroft left that first day, reminding him that she’ll check on the cat until further notice, and he’s been fine to let her do so. Baker Street may not be his home here, but it’s close enough that he’d rather stay there than move into a stranger’s house, even under the current, strange circumstances.

“Where are we off to?” he asks after Jane ushers him into the car. He watches London out the window, noting the little differences between here and home.

“Crime scene.”

Sherlock looks to Jane to elaborate, but she is watching the city go by out her window. After a few seconds of staring at her, he realises this must be how John feels when he only gives half answers because he expects everyone outside his brain to keep up.

“Annoying,” he mutters.

“What is?”

“Nothing. Introspection.”

“Introspection isn’t nothing.” Jane turns her attention to him, and for a moment she almost reminds him of Molly. Then it’s gone and the only resemblance is her tight ponytail and the shape of her face. “It goes hand in hand with retrospection. You can’t grow without it.”

“What are you, a psychologist?”

“Specialised in interpersonal relations,” she says with another shrug. “It comes in handy. You?”

“Chemist.” She raises a brow and looks him up and down. It makes him squirm. “What?”

“How useful has that been to your work?”

He wants to snap at her that it has been very useful to his work, thank you very much, but the truth is that he studied chemistry because he enjoyed it, and only got into his work afterward. The merit in a psychology degree as a basis for detection is not lost on him. When he tells her as much, it puts a smile on her face.

“Can I make a comment?”

“Suppose so.”

“You don’t look right in those clothes.”

Sherlock glances down at himself, at the clothes that belong to Will. They fit, so he’s making do, but jeans and a t-shirt are completely different from his preference and it’s more or less all his equivalent wears. The Belstaff peacoat was a pleasant surprise.

“It’s not Spencer Hart, but it’s not uncomfortable.” Giving a pointed look to Jane’s honey-coloured Burberry trench coat and tailored trousers, he adds, “I think I’m starting to understand why Molly wears what she does.”

“Do you spend a lot of time wondering why people have the wardrobes they do?”

“Not a lot.”

The conversation tapers off there, and they sit in semi-comfortable silence for the rest of the ride. It isn’t particularly long before the taxi pulls over in front of a row of familiar white houses and Jane pays the fare. The most noticeable thing about the area is how unlike a crime scene it appears, especially the lack of police tape, police cars, and police. Also…

“This is the Watsons’ house.”

“Yes it is. And did I say crime scene? I meant social call.” She leads the way to the leftmost house with confidence and he follows automatically. “I know myself well enough to find some bits of you. You wouldn’t have come if I’d said we were visiting friends for tea.”

 _I dislike you_ , Sherlock thinks at her for being completely right.

Jane steps up to the door and knocks twice. In the moments before the lock unlatches, something in her words throws up a flag inside his mind.

“When you say _friends_ –”

The door opens, and Sherlock finds himself looking at a ghost.

* * *

Molly knocks gently before opening the guest bedroom door a few inches and sticking her head inside. The shape is still there, under the blankets, facing the opposite wall. He hasn’t left to do anything other than drink water and use the bathroom since they got back from Baker Street… four days ago.

“Will?” His only response is to curl up tighter under the blankets. Steeling herself for a fight, Molly takes a step into the room. “Will, you need to eat something. Please.”

“’m fine.”

“No, you’re not, and that’s okay. You shouldn’t hide in there the entire time you’re here.”

“The human body can go three weeks without food. I won’t be here that long. Please leave me alone.”

She rubs at her eyes, wanting to cry but knowing she won’t. “I know it’s upsetting. You’re mourning. But you can’t hurt yourself because of it.”

“ _Upsetting_.” He sits up, finally, turning on her with a face that makes her flinch. “Two of my best friends are dead, one at the hands of my sister who’s locked up like some kind of island zoo exhibit, and you all seem to think that’s just _how it is_. I’m a little past _upset_.”

“I know–”

“No you don’t. You don’t know how I _feel_ or what it _means_ so do us both a favour and piss off.” With that, he drops onto the pillow, turns his back on her once more, and pulls the blankets over his head.

“As long as I know you’re safe,” she says, shutting the door to the spare bedroom. It’s the longest conversation they’ve had since he hid himself away. She’s grateful for that, at least.

Sitting at her kitchen peninsula after her retreat, Molly turns her mobile over and over in one hand while the other strokes Toby’s back where he loafs the next stool over. She doesn’t know what to do now. She wants to help. Will thought having to explain himself all over again would be the worst of it; he didn’t account for the answers to his own questions to be so painful. He was right to want to avoid John. Even in a place as impermanent as this, all she can do now is let him grieve while doing her best to take care of him, just like she would any other friend.

 _Friend_ , she thinks to herself. _You don’t even know him_.

But she does, doesn’t she? He isn’t just a knockoff of Sherlock; he has parts of her in him too. That’s got to be enough that she knows him implicitly. And if this is his way of mourning, he just needs time. She’s given him that so far, only trying to get anything out of him half a week later. He can keep going. _She_ can keep going.

Except, when Toby hops off the stool to meet the approaching footsteps halfway, she realises maybe she doesn’t have to.

“I want to apologise,” Will says softly, watching Toby winding around his legs.

“You don’t have to,” Molly assures him, patting Toby’s recently vacated seat. With some hesitation, Will drags himself toward her and sits. He seems to focus on his hands to ground himself, as he keeps his eyes on his fingers where they tap lightly on the countertop.

“Either way. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. You’ve only been trying to help me.”

“I’ve gotten worse at work.”

Will’s lips flicker up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile of understanding. “I hid in my room for three days when my mum and dad died. It happened around the end of uni. Accidental. Small funeral, just the three of us and a few other family members. Guess I haven’t grown as much as I thought.”

“I was the same when my dad died.” Molly reaches out and places a hand on top of his two. “I’m sorry I didn’t think about how hard this place might be for you.”

“Part of the experience,” Will says with a shrug. “It is weird here, though. Not just the bad stuff, but Mycroft? You said he _is_ the government here. Mine isn’t Big Brother running the world. Eurus isn’t too smart for her own safety. I’m not a world-famous detective. We’re just people. Sure we’re smart, and if I’m not brilliant they definitely are, but we’re not _geniuses_. We’re… I don’t know. Nerds.”

That pulls a titter from Molly and puts a slower, calmer smile on Will’s face.

“Do you want something to eat?” she asks. Will shrugs again, and it’s an answer enough. She hops off her stool and fetches him a sleeve of biscuits to snack on and leans on the counter opposite him. He looks so different from Sherlock, she realises. They have the same face, of course, but the way he holds himself more loosely and doesn’t look at things like he’s examining them makes him seem a completely different person. She does, however, recognise his current expression as the thinking face, and after his second biscuit, prompts him to share.

“I’d rather not make you worry more,” he says.

“No, go on.”

“I was just thinking… What do you think Sherlock will do when he learns Mary is still alive there?”

* * *

Jane shuffles over to John feeling the definition of an awkward third wheel. He looks like he’s trying to put a new frown line on his forehead as he stands in the doorway to the kitchen watching his best friend’s equivalent talking animatedly with his wife on the other side of the room. It’s the most enthusiastic Sherlock has been about anything so far, and he’s already made an image for himself in her mind as a bit of a misanthrope. It worries her, because when Mary answered the door, he looked at her like he was about to vomit or possibly faint.

“I’m trying not to be jealous,” John says, looking at the chatting pair like he doesn’t understand them. “I suppose it wouldn’t be a stretch to guess she’s his best friend in his world. So why do I have a feeling that’s not what’s happening?”

Jane looks from Sherlock and Mary to the floor beneath her feet. It’s not a stretch to guess that, no, but reviewing the information… She doesn’t want to tell him what it really is. She won’t fault Sherlock for monopolising on his time with Mary, knowing what she’s just realised. And they look so _happy_. Mary has always been welcoming, and while she doesn’t know Sherlock, she knows Will, and apparently that’s enough for her.

“Just us this time?” Jane offers in an attempt to steer the conversation to a neater place.

“Don’t do that.”

 _Busted already_ , her little voice taunts. She does her best to keep the grimace off her face. “Do what?”

“The only time you answer a question with a different question like that is when you don’t want to cause damage. So what is it?”

Chastising herself for not doing the bare minimum of asking questions of the man who currently lives on her sofa, Jane throws John a pleading look. “Do you really want me to say it?”

John returns her expression with a hard look of his own. Then, not two blinks later, it falls into something so, so sad, and she knows he understands.

“I’m sorry,” she tries, but he shakes his head. “I didn’t know until we came in and I saw his face. I’d have warned him, and you.”

“It’s fine.” John swallows hard and turns his gaze back to Sherlock and Mary, still in their own happy bubble. “Let him have this. It is just us; Greg got called in. I’ll go tell the girls it’s almost time to eat. And come get you if I need help dragging them away from their puzzle.”

Jane continues watching Sherlock when John goes upstairs to get the girls. As much as she’s trained herself to understand people, figuring Sherlock out has been as successful as trying to remember any interesting facts about oneself at an icebreaker. She’s kept him so occupied that she’s effectively removed the opportunity for any kind of discussion. They’ve barely talked about anything that isn’t work since she first put him to task. She’ll have to change that.

A few minutes later, the girls come flying down the stairs, immediately rounding the bannister and launching themselves at Sherlock. His eyes go comically wide before he holds his arms out to catch the kids in a hug instead of being tackled by them.

“I told them to leave him be,” John says, taking the stairs more slowly and rolling his eyes on the way down.

“Cute that you thought they’d listen,” Mary teases from the sofa. “Sherlock, this is Rosie and Charlie.”

She thought they were mad for having a second when Rosie was barely two. A baby and a toddler at the same time was chaos. But, at seven and five respectively, Rosamund and Charlotte Watson are the pictures of weirdly rounded-out introverts who would rather beg you to help them build a LEGO tower than take them to the park to run and scream with other kids. It’s stunning how they both managed to come out looking like fifty-fifty copies of their parents too, right down to John’s eyes and Mary’s waves. To a stranger they are cute little blond-haired-blue-eyed girls, but to friends and family, they’re like pink and yellow slips of carbon paper.

Giving herself one more moment to be entertained by Sherlock’s attempt to keep up with the bombardment of questions and comments from the girls, Jane follows John to the kitchen to help set the table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh? Did you think Sherlock was going to have a bad time immediately? Did you think I was going to let him be miserable from the start? No. No, not here. Here you get some false perceptions of safety.


	6. Chapter 6

It’s been a while since he’s been able to bounce Rosie on his hip, but it feels like he’s still got the hang of things. It’s just so strange to hold her as an infant again, knowing what she’s going to look like next year, and the year after that, and the year after that. He may not be Uncle Will here, but if Sherlock is Rosie’s godfather then he’ll happily do this part all over again. At least at this age he doesn’t have to think about how she’ll be an only child, and from there, he doesn’t have to think too much about Mary. It’s only been a couple weeks but he misses her, and it stings fiercely that he can’t express that for fear of hurting John.

He distracts himself by bouncing Rosie some more, getting a giggle out of her instead of a frustrated grunt, and carries her to the pile of jumbo-sized puzzle pieces he’s laid out on the coffee table.

“Do you want to try it?” He sits on the sofa and moves Rosie to his lap. “I know the clatter startled you and I’m sorry. Auntie Molly will be home soon, we should surprise her. And Daddy will be so proud when he comes to pick you up and he sees what you made! What do you think? Should we try to put the puzzle together?”

Jane always said he was the better of them when it came to kids, especially young ones. She’s not bad with older kids but he can always tell when she’s had enough. Having known her for over a decade and having shared the godparent experience over seven years, he’s become adept at noticing when she’d rather not be around people.

It’s one of the parts of her that doesn’t seem to exist in Molly. They’ve had Rosie a few times since he got dropped here two weeks ago and her enthusiasm for people doesn’t waver. Maybe it’s a part that’s him, maybe it’s just what he’s seeing of her with Rosie because… because Mary isn’t here, but Molly gives her big heart to Rosie and always has enough left over for everyone else.

Will uses slow movements to show Rosie the big puzzle pieces and where he places them. She reaches out every so often to grab one, which she lets him take and put in its spot. It’s only a thirty-piece puzzle, but he’s doing it for her benefit, and when he puts two pieces together he tells her how good she’s doing. Eventually, they have a nice big Winnie the Pooh on the table, and he helps her clap, because she deserves the applause for a job well done.

He’s reclined on the sofa with Rosie dozing in his arms when Molly arrives. She places a small cardboard box on the coffee table before reaching for Rosie, cooing at their puzzle and kissing her chubby cheeks before so much as looking at him.

“He says everything you need is in there.” She tilts her head toward the little box.

“Did he elaborate on _why_ I’ll be needing it?” Will asks, reaching for the box and using a thumbnail to break the seal of tape.

“That’s supposed to have stuff in it that’ll help you look less like Sherlock when you’re out and about, because he’s been gone long enough that people have started to notice. Apparently Mycroft’s already had to threaten a couple of keen amateur photographers who got pictures of you heading to the shops claiming you’re Sherlock in disguise for a case.”

“Is his every movement the media’s business or are they just vultures?”

“Bit of both?”

The box contains a few sets of brown coloured contacts and a care kit for them; a business card for a barber who is presumably also some kind of secret agent; various pieces of ID, a debit card for a bank he’s never heard of, and a credit card for a company he has heard of, all with the name William Scott on them; and an employee badge for Barts with the same name. It looks exactly like the one he has back home apart from the name and the picture. Now he knows why Mycroft had Molly take pictures of him in front of the wall a few days ago.

“I think he’s telling me to stop being a mooch,” Will says, passing Molly the badge so she can admire the handiwork. “Looking forward to working with you, Dr. Hooper.”

“Same to you, Dr. Scott. What’s that at the bottom?”

“Hmm?” Will looks in the box again and realizes the padding underneath the items is actually a folded up newspaper page. He unfolds the page two story and reads out the headline. “‘Private case for the private eye? Rumours abound as distinct detective Sherlock Holmes hasn’t been seen in weeks.’ So nice they care.”

“Can I have that?”

Throwing her a _sure, whatever_ face, Will exchanges the paper for the badge. Molly frowns at the article as she skims through it, keeping the paper out of Rosie’s reach.

“Don’t bin this,” she says, dropping it back on the coffee table. “Anything else?”

“Looks like that’s it. I’m glad to have something to do that isn't lounging around here being unbelievably bored, but a full-time job wasn’t something I expected. I don't know why he thinks I’ll be here _that_ long. The upper limit for drops is a month.”

“It’s probably more for the worst case, so let’s play it by ear. Mycroft keeps close tabs on Sherlock and he’ll probably have an eye on you, so you shouldn’t have much to worry about past the feeling of being watched all the time.”

“Does he watch you too?”

Molly bites the inside of her cheek the way he does when he doesn’t like a question, so he lets her steer away from it. “John should be here to fetch Rosie in an hour or so. D’you want some tea and biscuits?”

“If you’re making some. Rosie hasn’t snacked yet.”

Will packs up his box as Molly takes Rosie to the kitchen for some biscuits and sets the newspaper on top with the headline facing down. He doesn’t understand her wanting to keep that record of her friend being gone. Is it so she can show him when he gets back that people noticed?

Jane wouldn’t care about the papers noticing her absence at any point, but then she isn’t famous like Sherlock is here. She’s always made a point to keep her head down, refusing all public displays of appreciation. From what he’s read online and heard from Molly and John, Sherlock hates the grander gestures and would return to that anonymity if given the chance.

He must be enjoying the peace over there.

* * *

Sherlock feels his soul try to jump out of his skin at the shouted command to wake up. It reminds him of the drunk tank the morning after John’s stag night. Knowing better, he doesn’t try to sit up, merely rolling over with a groan and forcing his eyes to crack open.

“Rise and shine,” the same voice says, patting his shoulder in some kind of motivational gesture.

Filling his lungs and emptying them in a gust, Sherlock turns his head and squints up at his alarm clock. “Greg?”

“Got to bed early, did you?”

Sherlock rubs some of the sleep out of his eyes and drags himself into a sitting position on the sofa. Looking around the room, he realises the sun is coming in the windows at a considerably different angle from when he went down for his nap. “I had the Watsons today.”

“Those girls can run the best ones ragged. Look, Jane said she’ll be out on her case until late and that I can borrow you. Are you good?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He gracelessly slaps the mobile he’s been given off the coffee table in his effort to check the time and concludes that he needs coffee. Lestrade’s eyes stay on him as he trudges to the kitchen, silently judging him for his unkemptness or inability to keep up with two incredibly inquisitive children for an afternoon.

“She said a murder would be more up your street than what you’ve been doing recently,” Lestrade says once Sherlock has taken his second gulp of coffee.

“Where?”

“Brixton. Lauriston Gardens.”

Sherlock pauses in the middle of lifting his mug to his lips. “Fourth like it?”

“Fifth. How–”

“And there’s a note this time, I bet.” He lets his disappointment through with a sigh. “It would be something I’ve done already….” Seeing the look of alarm on Lestrade’s face, Sherlock backpedals and realises his lament may sound a bit alarming. So he clarifies, “I’ve had this one, but it was years ago, and it was only four. Serial killings, not serial suicides. It was the cabbie.”

He doesn’t mention that the cabbie slash serial killer had a sponsor in Jim Moriarty, because he’s looked into this world’s Jim Moriarty and found that he is completely harmless, apart from his somewhat disquieting collection of M&M’s memorabilia. Jim Moriarty and Will Holmes even follow each other on Twitter, because as it happens, this Moriarty really does work in IT at Barts with his good friend, Carl Powers.

“So will you come?”

“Still want me to?”

“Well, we can’t exactly call in your cabbie with nothing to go on. And if the number’s different, maybe something else will be.”

Sherlock nods slowly and takes another long drink of coffee. He’s been given the short end of the stick in choosing cases. He can’t take any that require him to be out of the city overnight in case he gets dropped back, and he can’t take any that might escalate into a situation he may not be able to get out of, so he’s mostly been left at the kids’ table with the quick and easy one-to-fives. If Lestrade is right, it’s work, and if he’s wrong, this is the part where the killer has made a mistake and he can replay in his own favour.

He joins Lestrade in the police car this time because what does he have to prove here and dips into his mind palace for his memories of the case. He’ll need to keep a cooler head this time. _No games, no risks, no showing off. Just work._ Sherrinford helped him clear his head. He just needs to stay on that track. _Maintain focus. Don’t do anything rash._

_Be nice_ , another thought urges him when he steps out of the car in front of the old house. Donovan is there, coordinating officers in her to-the-point manner, sending them off and then turning to act as a barrier when Sherlock tries to cross the tape after Lestrade.

“Who’s this?” She casts him a critical glance and aims the question at Lestrade.

“He’s with me,” Lestrade says amicably, ushering Sherlock around her under the tape.

“I can see what, but who is he? I thought you were going to get your girlfriend.”

Lestrade grimaces and Sherlock holds back a scowl. “He’s Will’s equivalent. He’s been working with Jane since he got dropped a couple weeks ago ’cause he’s the detective there.”

“Alright, fine. What do you call yourself, then?”

It takes Sherlock an instant to realise Donovan is talking to him after the distracting back-and-forth, but he manages to blink himself back to attention and present his hand. “Sherlock Holmes. I hope we can work well together here, Sgt. Donovan.”

“Do we work well together there?” she asks slowly, shaking his hand with an understandable amount of wariness.

“It’s developing,” Sherlock says honestly. There was a large gap after he came back from the dead where he didn’t interact with Donovan at all, but when they finally crossed paths again, they came to a respectful, if not particularly amicable, truce. They’re not on a first name basis but they’re also not spitting acid, and she smiled at a joke he made one time, so in his opinion it’s going quite well.

He exchanges similar pleasantries with this world’s Anderson and lets Lestrade talk him into shoe covers at the top of the stairs, but draws the line at zipping himself into a human-shaped bin bag. The sight when he walks into the room is unexpected, and he lets out a small “Oh” at the body, face down as he remembers her being, but this time clad head to toe in bright purple.

“Already?” Lestrade teases from the doorway.

Sherlock throws him a look and makes his rounds, finding every piece of information the same as where he found it before. The same scratches in the floor with the same broken nails. The same dirty ring, the same wet coat, the same dry umbrella, the same spread of dirt on her calves, the same, the same, the same. What’s different this time is that he narrates his findings as they come, wrapping it all up in a bow with the obvious question: “No suitcase?”

“No.”

“It’ll be in a skip nearby. With any luck she’s left her phone with him and we’ll have an easy time tracking him down.”

“What about the revenge?” Anderson chimes in from the doorway. When Sherlock and Lestrade turn to him, he points to the letters etched into the floor. “She’s German. _Rache_. It’s German for revenge. She could be trying to tell us something.”

“A reasonable assumption if this case were anything deeper than a dying man aiming to outlive people.” _That’s a nicer way to say it, right?_ “Jennifer Wilson wasn’t leaving a note in German. She was writing _Rachel_. You’ll find the connection with some quick research.”

Anderson looks sufficiently appeased and shrugs before walking away. Lestrade, meanwhile, raises his brow at Sherlock.

“The case, then?”

“He’s made his mistake,” Sherlock explains as he snaps off his gloves. “It was pink before, but this purple will be just as easy to find. Purple coat, purple suit, purple nails, purple shoes – we should be grateful she chose not to coordinate her lipstick this time. The case will be purple, small, an overnight bag. Everything she packed should be in it except her phone. Without it we’ll have to run him down the slow way.”

“Right…. I guess I’ll send some people out to find the case.”

“I’ll get it. You’ll have it in half an hour.”

“It’s evidence, Sherlock, I can’t let you–”

“Too late, I already know where it is!” Sherlock shucks his shoe covers on his way out of the room and bins them and his gloves before flying down the stairs. He’s half a dozen steps from the bottom when Lestrade yells at him to wait.

“Why are you being helpful like this?” Lestrade shouts from the landing.

“I’ve grown patient!” Sherlock calls back, jumping the last few steps and running out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Would you look at that, it's already been two weeks.  
> It would be a shame if  
> it lasted  
> longer.


	7. Chapter 7

The last time she went this long living with someone who wouldn’t talk to her, she was in the middle of the moving-out phase of a breakup. This time is so different that she has absolutely no idea what to do about it.

It’s strange enough that she’ll walk into a room and see Will hunched over some textbook or other, but paired with the lack of acknowledgement of her existence it feels like she’s sharing her house with a living statue. She’ll walk into the kitchen and he’ll be sitting with his arms folded on the table in front of him devouring whatever it is he’s studying, and when she walks back out again one of his hands will be in his hair but the rest of him will be in the same position. It’s strange at best and is starting to become full-out creepy.

She finally bursts a little over a week in at lunch with Meena, spilling her guts all over a rare occasion with their differing shifts and duties. It comes out in an uncontrollable stream, even the stuff about who Will really is and why he’s here, leaving Molly feeling lighter but stunned at her incredible failure to keep a secret.

“Nice view though,” Meena says casually. Molly stares at her, bug-eyed, wondering why on Earth her friend just seemed to bypass the incredulity and slide right into acceptance. When she sees Molly’s face, Meena shrugs. “What? I’m allowed to look.”

“Th… _What?_ ” is all Molly manages.

“Look, we matched breaks last week and he just sort of sat across from me. He’s fit, okay? Especially when he does that thing.” Meena runs her fingers up through her fringe to push it back in an accurate demonstration of _that thing_ Will does when his hair falls in his face. It’s almost enough to snap Molly out of her bewildered state. “Obviously don’t tell Sherlock I said that. It’s hard to believe that lily-white mop-top is the same guy.”

Molly spends the rest of her day in a daze, playing through the conversation on repeat until she steps through the door that night. Will is still up after his early shift, pacing the living room with that damn textbook. She has to blink herself back to reality when he pushes his hair out of his face and spares her a glance.

“I told Meena about you and she didn’t care,” Molly announces. “It was like she didn’t even notice I said it, but she did, and she just didn’t care.”

“Interesting,” Will murmurs, his first word in a week. If they’d been on the same shift would it have made a difference? Probably, since he can’t possibly spend his workday with his face in a book.

“What are you even reading?” She doesn’t mean to snap, but he’s made her so tense recently that she might as well. Stomping up to him, she yanks the book from his hands – keeping his page open because she may be mad but she’s not impolite – and flips it over to read the covers. “Why are you studying theories of the universe?”

“Because I’m not supposed to be here.” He takes the book back and drops it on the coffee table with a loud _slam!_ that makes her jump. His hands fly to his hair and he looks like he wants to rip it out, but his voice remains even. “I should have left days ago and I’m still here and I want to know if there’s another explanation for _why_.”

“Other than what?” she asks immediately, but she knows before her mouth even moves.

It makes her glad when Will deflates, drops onto the sofa, and picks up the textbook to dive back in. With the way his eyes empty of all emotion and focus back on the words, she thinks she doesn’t want to hear it spoken.

* * *

They said a month. One month. Singular. Not _about a month_. Not _a couple months_. One month.

And yet, here he is. Still. Thirty-seven days later.

He finally gave up and moved into Will’s house on day twenty-three after a spectacular fight with Jane, which itself followed a verbal thrashing from Lestrade about his _methods_ for taking _shortcuts_ on a case he solved half a decade ago. Another repeat in a long line over three weeks, as if this world decided to throw his entire career at him at breakneck speed to prove some kind of point. What started as a fun way to play the puzzles again has turned into tedium. Reliving the ways and means of his earlier cases, remembering how he got from point to point, has become exhausting.

Thirty-seven days. He would almost call it funny that he got dropped here two days from two years since his return from the dead. While he’s been waiting for that same fluke of science to toss him back into his own world, Sherlock has been watching the days flit by without a care for him or his life. He’s passed their expected threshold and is now in the uncomfortable and frightening situation of not knowing what to do next.

And the house. Molly’s house was a safe place, somewhere he could go to hide and get away and think and recover and exist without having to think about anything outside the walls surrounding him. While the majority of the space is the same in Will’s home, right down to the cat who’ll sleep in the crook of his arm if given the chance, being there feels wrong. It _is_ wrong, of course – he knows he’s essentially squatting in a missing man’s home – but knowing the layout, feeling the dip in his favourite spot on the sofa, even the smell of the floors, none of that familiarity can make up for the deep ache that settles in his chest when he lies down on the far side of the bed and faces the empty spot where Molly should be. The house is nothing without her in it. Not welcoming. Not warm. Not safe. Just a building with some stuff in it and Phoebe, the little grey and white tabby, who follows him around and does her feline best to take care of him.

He’s glad to leave in the morning, whether he goes to Baker Street to pick up some of Jane’s cases or roams the streets of London making a mental list of what’s the same and what’s not. For the past two weeks he’s been visiting Mycroft and Eurus every day – mostly Eurus – and learning as much as he can about them and the work they do. It’s all impermanent and he knows this Eurus, with her short hair and bright eyes and large gesticulation when she tries to dumb down the science of it all for him, won’t be what he returns to when he eventually does get dropped back home. He has a chance to spend time with her, to see her and hear her and laugh with her and feel her presence. He’ll be greedy and selfish and a little happier for it.

As he is now, walking with her through streets lit by lamps and signs and storefronts, breath steaming in the frosty December air.

“I don’t _need_ my big brother to walk me home in the dark,” Eurus says with a wide smile, taking his arm in hers. “But I have to admit, I’m enjoying the company. When was the last time you had a stroll like this?”

“Summer. With you. I was high out of my mind and you were pretending to be the daughter of a serial killer.” He sees her brows shoot up and shrugs awkwardly. “We have very complicated lives.”

She hums thoughtfully and Sherlock can see her connecting the dots from other things he’s told her. The sad look that stays on her face just a little too long is enough for him to know she’s placed it at the right time. Somehow, it doesn’t hurt as much as he expects.

“I’m sure you’re glad to be able to spend time with people you love, even if they’re different here.”

“I am.” Anything he can say to that is an understatement. Eurus, aware and stable; Mary, alive and well; sometimes it makes him think this world is the better one. “But I would still like to go home. That world may not have everyone in it, but it’s where I fit.”

“You don’t feel like you fit here?”

“How could I? I’m essentially replacing someone else here. And while that world doesn’t have everyone that matters to me… neither does this one.”

“Mum and Dad?”

Try as he might to avoid it, Sherlock snorts. “They’re around so little there I can barely miss them here.” He expects a wince at least, but Eurus just frowns. So, feeling safe, he explains, “Jane’s not the same as Molly. It’s harder to be around her.”

“What’s the hard part?”

“We don’t like each other.” Eurus barks a laugh at the simplicity of it before quickly sobering and gesturing for him to explain further. “We’re far too similar and at the same time vastly different. We work together effectively but I’d much rather have Molly.”

That gets a grin from Eurus that he cherishes until she reminds him of the obvious.

“Unfortunately you’ll have to deal with your mutual distaste a while longer. You’re a moment in science that we have to study. To know why you’re still here and how we can get you back, if we can.”

“ _If_ you can?”

“We’re looking into a method for how to get something or someone to another world. But we’d need more than we have, coordinates, and even theoretically we couldn’t get anything _back_ from the other place. We’d need an example to know where to go, too.”

“So you can’t send me back until you’ve got coordinates, and you can’t get coordinates until you’ve sent me back.”

“And if we did manage it, there might be two of you in that world.”

“That does pose a problem….” Sherlock mulls over the concept for a moment before he notices the little flag waving in the back of his mind. “What do you mean there _might_ be two of me?”

“There’s a theory that’s more plausible than others as to why some people get stuck after the thirty-day window. Did Mycroft tell you about the ones who didn’t come back?”

“No,” Sherlock says slowly. He’s not sure he likes the turn this has taken.

Eurus, it seems, is perfectly content to share more details of her studies. “In the past there have been a few drops that didn’t go back to where they came from. For example, in 2004, a woman who’d only been here a few days was struck by a car, and her home equivalent never returned. Or in 1997 with the man who was ill and died in hospital on his fourteenth day and _his_ home equivalent, who was perfectly healthy at the drop, never returned. There have also been equivalents who never left this world and based on the other cases–”

“The equivalent died.”

“That’s the leading theory, yes.”

Sherlock searches his sister for any sign of emotion other than professional interest and sees nothing. Her detachment makes his skin crawl much in the same way as the dead eyed stare his own Eurus gave him when he entered her cell for the first time.

“Doesn’t that bother you?”

“Not really,” she says with a shrug. “It’s a logical hypothes–”

“Doesn’t it bother you that you’re just accepting your brother is dead?”

Her face darkens and in that instant he sees she’s not being willfully ignorant; she’s building herself a wall. She’s had to separate her work from the reality of people and now it’s hit closer than she expected it to. He’s seen the way Molly looks at her patients, treating them with the respect she’d give to any living person. Eurus is scientific. Logical. She approaches her work from a completely different angle.

It wouldn’t have disturbed him a year or two ago, but he’s something else now. And she’s not the Eurus he knows, so he takes it for what it is. He pulls her into a hug and she clings to him for a while as other pedestrians walk past this strange pair of siblings swaying in place on the pavement.

“I’ll do my best here,” he tells her, but he doesn’t make any promises, because he knows he won’t be able to keep them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your patience while I repeatedly failed to write things in order this past month.
> 
> Also, BIG thank you to everyone who nominated and voted for this fic in the SAMFAs! I really appreciate it and I hope you'll continue to enjoy it!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you as always for your patience. It's been tougher than expected to get up the motivation to write, so when I'm able to add anything at all, it's a win I spend too much time celebrating. This one isn't a long one, but it is a sort of stepping stone.

Ah, there it is again. At least she’s learned not to be alarmed by it anymore. He comes and goes in waves and she figures it’s just the way he’s trying to come to terms with the reality of things, so she tends to let him wander.

She’s seen Sherlock in action and knows he’s still going at top speed whenever he checks out like this. His eyes will flit around without aim, connecting dots and forming patterns like waking REM, or they’ll stick to a spot while he goes on a deep dive into his mind palace.

However, now is not the time, so she reaches across the sea of gift bags and wrapping paper to give him a little tap on the cheek. It startles him slightly and he takes a moment to blink his neurons back into action after staring at the wall too long, glancing at everyone in the circle individually to make sure he hasn’t been caught out ignoring the festivities.

Rosie and Charlie sit beside the tree with an enormous open box in front of them, reaching in to retrieve the smaller boxes inside, jabbering excitedly about which puzzles they should put together first. They’re so easy to buy for it’s almost tragic, but two dozen jigsaws should keep them well occupied, and John and Mary will get some quiet time while their daughters are distracted by the trove.

Jane wasn’t sure if she should add Sherlock’s name to the tags – she goes halves with Will on the girls’ gifts and has done since Rosie’s first Christmas – but he beat her to the wrapping while she was out on a case and marked all the tags himself with only her name. She made him sit down and add his own that morning before they packed up and headed over to the Watsons’ and was pleased to hear no argument about it.

They go around the circle twice, the girls getting extra gifts from family and friends resulting in an astonishing pile of clothes, books, and toys that Sherlock dutifully relocates while Jane fills a bin bag with the wrapping paper strewn about. He makes a good show of being enthusiastic for everyone else while he gets hopped over in the process, still managing to show off when John unwraps a box of light bulbs and gives him a slightly confused thanks before the yellowed light above them flashes blue and goes out completely. In the light of the Christmas tree alone, Sherlock winks at John, taking the box from the latter’s hands to replace the bulb himself while Mary howls with laughter at her husband’s face and the girls yell over each other asking how Sherlock knew that was going to happen.

The actual breakfast lasts longer than the gift giving. Mycroft and Eurus show up halfway through as promised, and in the commotion of extending the table and adding a pair of chairs, Jane raises her brows at them in a silent question. The pair nod simultaneously, Eurus tipping her head toward the living room.

It’s easier than she anticipated to convince Sherlock to entertain the girls while the other adults clear up after breakfast. He seems keen enough to sit down in the quieter room with them that, when they lead him out by the hands, he doesn’t even notice what’s different until he’s cleared half of the coffee table of piled gifts. He reaches for the case as if it’s part of the horde, and there’s a moment where he blinks fast, trying to figure out where the large rectangle came from. Then he looks up to see the small crowd gathered in the doorway watching him and she sees it click.

He runs his hand over the case and sits on the sofa, pulling it onto his lap. Rosie and Charlie scramble up to sit on either side of him and direct the adults to come into the room and sit too.

“It was a group effort,” John says, sitting on the floor across the table with Mary on one side and Mycroft and Eurus on the other. “Jane’s idea though.”

“Throwing me under the bus,” Jane says in mock complaint, taking the space on Mary’s other side. In reality she’s rather proud of having kept the gift a secret. She kept it in mind after the one and only time Sherlock lamented not having one, just a few days after his drop. She nods to him. “Go on.”

He visibly steels himself, flicks open the clasps, and lifts the lid.

The girls ooh and aah as Sherlock brushes his fingers over the varnished wood. He runs his fingers down the grain of the body, stained red-brown spruce on top and maple on the back and sides, the wood lightened around the edges to emphasise the shape of the body. It’s a beautiful thing to look at, not a superior model but also not inexpensive, and although she could have bought it on her own, having the Watsons and the Holmeses pitch in with her makes it a bit more special.

None of them make a thing of his shining eyes and shaky frown as he continues to admire the instrument in moved silence, but Jane does have to take a moment to look somewhere else to avoid softening to the point of crying herself. She’s not the only one, it seems, as she spots Mary patting John’s arm and Mycroft and Eurus watching their brother with sad smiles.

He doesn’t thank them. She’s pretty sure if he were to try he might implode. It’s more than just an instrument, to him and to the rest of them. It’s bittersweetness in a plastic-enforced case, a letter that says he’s part of this place and part of them.

When Charlie quietly asks if he can play something for them, Sherlock allows himself a hearty sniffle and flips to presentation mode, showing the circle how to tune a violin and rosin a bow.

It might be the first time since he appeared that he looks comfortable in his skin.

* * *

Looking out into her living room, Molly wonders how she managed to make this work. John entertaining Rosie, Mrs. Hudson having a chat with Greg… It all feels so normal, even if she doesn’t.

As Christmas loomed, Will remained, and the mirror above her dresser collected a few more articles on Sherlock’s continued nonpresence in London. It’s been pulling at her seams each passing day, having to acknowledge the reality that Sherlock won’t be coming back. It’s hard to hope for a stroke of luck when Will is so miserable about it, but at least he’s not shutting himself away with those books anymore.

She hasn’t asked him to leave and doesn’t think she’ll ever have the heart to. If he goes, she might forget and hurt herself all over again by remembering.

Some days are good though, and she’ll feel more herself, more like Regular Molly and not the Molly that’s emotionally exhausted by losing someone she cares deeply about but still sort of has around. It’s almost the same vice in her gut as a shitty breakup where you still have to be pleasant and interact with them on a daily basis but you can’t tell them you miss them.

Today is one of those good days, not because it’s Christmas and it has to be, but because she is celebrating with her loved ones and knows she’s about to win the day.

Will has a customised slot he fits into in all their lives. It’s something she and him have been talking about over the last few weeks after she blabbed about him to Meena. How has he been able to fit in so smoothly, without fuss, when things like travelling across universes are purely science fiction here? They’ve tested theories on more people, discovering that no, _no one_ really cares when they’re told. No one acts like it’s anything strange, and neither of them has the first idea why.

She enters the kitchen and her mobile rings at exactly the moment she puts the kettle on the hob and turns on the element.

“Merry Christmas, Mycroft!”

“ _What_ are you doing?” the icy voice demands.

“I’ve just put the kettle on,” Molly replies cheerily, knowing full well he watched her do it. She turns to her kitchen window and waves at the CCTV camera across the road, which then makes its shameful rotation back toward the street.

“Doing this puts him at risk. It puts _them_ at risk.”

Molly rolls her eyes at his drama but keeps herself pleasant. “It’ll be okay. No one is in danger. No one even _cares_. The entire morgue staff at Barts know and no one finds it interesting. It’s like… I don’t know what it’s like. It’s irrelevant.”

To that, Mycroft says nothing for a long moment. She imagines him scowling like a grumpy cat.

“I know you’re worried about him,” she offers. “We all are. But this will be fine. You can come by too, if you want.”

“Thank you for the invitation but I intend to enjoy my one day free of people per year.”

“Merry Christmas, then.”

“Merry Christmas. That will be them now.”

The beep of disconnection is followed by the chime of her doorbell and Molly lets herself be impressed, partly with Mycroft’s timing but mostly with herself. She half expected him to put up a fight, but either the trust she’s earned or her guests’ proximity made that phone call much shorter than she’d prepared for.

Will claims the door and Molly waits by the kettle watching in nervous excitement. She knows it was a good idea, it _has_ to have been a good idea – and when Will pulls each of them into a long, swaying hug, her nerves melt away.

He takes a step back to properly let his parents into her house and he’s glassy-eyed and grinning like a fool.

They’re summoned by Rosie’s call as soon as their boots are off and Will takes their coats into his room to toss on the bed. But he doesn’t go to them when he comes back out. Instead, he makes a beeline to the kitchen, pulling Molly into a suffocating hug with her toes barely brushing the ground.

“I didn’t get you anything,” he says into her shoulder.

The best she can manage in the air is a titter, but after he puts her down, she quickly shoos him back into the main room. God knows she’d love another day with her dad, but for her it’s just not possible. For him, though, all it took was a phone call.

Seeing his gloom break into joy, even just for now, makes it worth something.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's m-m-m-MONTAGE TIIIIIME! 
> 
> Note: this chapter contains a panic attack.

The happy buzz carries on through the rest of the holidays. Work continues, the right people have the right nights off, the New Year’s Eve party is small but fun, and Molly doesn’t feel a twinge of jealousy when Meena gives Will a kiss at midnight because she gets one immediately after per the Single Friends Tradition.

His birthday is much quieter, sombre even. Still, she goes out of her way after work to get him a fancy cupcake and at home she lights the single candle she stuck in it and tells him to make a wish.

“It won’t come true if you know it,” he argues from his spot across the table.

“Only if you say it out loud.”

He purses his lips at that and blows out the little flame, insisting on splitting the cupcake with her. He rips the bottom off of his half and eats it like a hamburger.

* * *

It snows so much on New Year’s Eve that many parties are cancelled. Sherlock doesn’t skip it, although he would have preferred to sleep through it. His phone won’t chime with the usual messages either way, so he leaves it with Phoebe and steps into a pair of clunky boots to make the short trek down to the nearest pub ten minutes before midnight.

He ducks in shortly before the minute starts to count down, stomping the crunchy wet snow off his boots and shaking it out of his hair. He doesn’t take a seat, merely stands by the door watching the patrons, the groups of friends and families all out celebrating buying another calendar. A couple passersby clap him on the shoulder and share a festive greeting which he returns with a benign smile.

Once the crowd has finished singing and cheering and hugging and kissing, Sherlock steps out and walks back home, having fulfilled his promise to be “at least a little social” for the event.

On the sixth, he texts Jane to tell her he’s not taking cases. She wishes him a happy birthday and makes no attempt to contact him for two days. He receives a few more birthday wishes and Mary sends him thirty-nine cake emojis, but he’s made it clear enough that he doesn’t want to be around people.

He spends the day composing and playing for Phoebe. She complains when he stops.

* * *

Despite being invited to what the others call an anti-romantic night out, Will and Molly hunker down in front of the TV and watch as many B-movies as they can fit into one evening and get wine drunk debating whether a shark and an octopus could defeat a sharktopus.

* * *

His feet catch on the icy pavement until he descends into an arbitrary Tube station and sets up in a free space. He counts the people who pass by; the ones who glance at him, the ones who stop and listen, the ones who are in too much of a rush to even notice he’s there. Not a single person recognises him, and the anonymity tastes like country air.

* * *

Rosie’s energy tapers out after cake, to everyone’s surprise and delight. John puts her down for her afternoon nap and thanks the few guests for the birthday party. Greg and Mrs. Hudson are two peas in a pod, chattering about their love of babies as he leads her out of the house to drive her back to Baker Street.

Molly and Will stick around for a while, knowing John needs some quiet-but-not-alone time. At some point he asks if Molly and Will are together, because he’d never thought about it, but that would normally be a question asked of two adults of the opposite sex who live together, wouldn’t it?

It almost feels gross to acknowledge, and when Molly and Will share a look, they both know the other is in agreement. Neither is the person the other wants, and although they’ve never spoken about it, they both know it intuitively. Another effect of the phenomenon.

* * *

Sherlock sits under the awning, squinting when the sun breaks through the clouds and lights up his surroundings. The dregs of tea in the takeout cup in front of him are mixed with ash. It’s a terrible day to be in a terrible mood, but here he is, at a table outside Speedy’s, not enjoying his first cigarette in an age.

He’s halfway through it when the chair opposite him is pulled out and Jane drops into it with a huff.

There’s no ice left in him to comment.

“We’ve been removed from the case,” Jane tells him.

“Naturally.”

“Greg says not to come back until we’ve gotten pissed and had a shag about it. Do we really fight that much?”

Sherlock shrugs and takes a drag. The crudeness should have snapped him to attention, but he’s too busy wallowing. He doesn’t care either way; it’d be keeping the streak.

“What?”

“Hm?”

“You said something about a streak.”

“Oh.” Was he thinking out loud? Usually it’s the other way around and he talks to someone in his head. “Nothing.”

“Have you never had sex sober?”

“I’m going home,” he says, pulling as much as he can in one inhalation and dropping the remains of the cigarette into the cup. He insists to himself he’s not running away as he gets up to toss the cup and flag down a cab.

“Text me if you want to talk about it.”

“I won’t.”

* * *

There’s less and less of something in Molly with every new story. Every headline she tapes to her mirror takes something more away from her, like Sherlock wasn’t just a friend or someone she loved, but a piece of her, ingrained in her soul, somewhere he could always be protected.

Nobody can truly be protected from the dumb luck reality dishes out. Some people leave. Some people are already gone.

It took some begging to get here, and now that he’s sat on the floor with a thick wall of glass between him and a version of his sister, Will feels like Eurus was always one of the ones who was already gone. She’s missing something too, and it’s not something he can give.

He talks to her. Tells her about his world, his work, what’s different, what’s the same. Tells her stories about the woman she isn’t. And she listens, mirroring him inside her cell, her face never changing. Is she thinking about what he’s saying? Does she care? Will she want to sit across from him and listen to his waffling again next week?

He knows he’ll come, because if he’s the only one she has, he wants to be enough.

* * *

“Got your post,” Sherlock says bitterly as he enters Jane’s flat and drops the small stack of envelopes on the desk. “The world must be upside down if I’m the one going outside everyday.”

“I’ve been busy,” Jane replies from the kitchen.

“Yes….” Sherlock casts an eye around the room, noting the documents and pictures strewn about, the half-dozen mugs shoved into a corner of the desk with congealed sludge at the bottom of them, the distinct smell of permanent marker. Thinking to distract himself from picking up whatever obviously important case Jane is working on, he flips through the envelopes, rattling off their purposes to Jane as she makes yet another cup of coffee. “Ooh!”

Suddenly she’s right beside him, her hair in a disastrous bun atop her head and wearing what might be day four clothes. He flips the one interesting envelope over in his hands and holds it up to the light. No return address, flap-sealed, cheap poundstore stock, with one piece of lined paper inside. Again he dictates his findings, and Jane snatches the envelope out of his hand.

“A threat!” She pulls the flap and unfolds the paper inside, reading the short penned scribbles with frantic eyes. “‘Back off Lumlow if you know what’s good for you.’ Ominous!”

“Stop being excited.”

“You were excited.”

“I was interested. You’re high on caffeine.”

“I can be both!”

* * *

Word travels fast when there are so few living people to talk to in a day, and once it reaches him, it stews and festers until he arrives at the house and sees Molly on the sofa scowling into a paperback novel.

“I heard.” It’s hardly a decent start, but he’s never been the best at starting conversations. “You were right.”

“Yes, I was,” Molly says icily. “He _embarrassed me_ in front of my peers and I was _still right_.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you. He shouldn’t have questioned you.”

“Why do people think they can do that?” She snaps her book shut and slams it onto the sofa cushion beside her. “I’ve worked _so hard_ to get to where I am. I put _so much_ of myself into this job. I’ve been doing it for a decade. I didn’t choose this because it’s lucrative or easy. I didn’t get through school with the help of Mummy and Daddy like this _prick_. I earned my place and trained myself and taught myself and did it all _myself_.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Or do you think you do?”

He knows it’s an emotional retort, but it still gives him pause. His family is well off and he did get support through school, but he still put in the effort himself. He, however, isn’t a woman in a male-dominated field who’s just been walked on and aggressed because of it.

“I think I do.”

“I could have called Mycroft,” she pouts, picking up her book but not actually reading it. “I could just ask and that _dildo_ would be shipped off to some miserable place I don’t care about. But I _didn’t_ because I didn’t want that win to be because another man helped me!”

Will sits down beside her and gently takes the book from her hands to place it on the table. She’s too riled up to go back to it anyway, and he makes a point to apologise for that.

“Do you want a hug?” he offers awkwardly, unsure where to go next.

Molly glares at him with crossed arms and knit brows.

“Yes.”

* * *

He barely made it up to 221B before everything went to hell and he imploded.

His brain is firing too fast, too loud, like a spectacle of fireworks all going off at once. He’s becoming buried in a paper tower, each sheet a thought, a piece of irrelevant information, an alarm he doesn’t need and they’re piling up and up and up and up and–

The alarms should quiet when Jane enters Baker Street. He makes eye contact with her and she sees his distress, and then he makes eye contact with the person behind her and the alarms multiply and blare and he feels like he’s not getting enough oxygen and he moves to do _anything_ to get rid of the spectre and Jane shoves him down into a chair and takes something from the desk and hands it to the spectre and pushes him out the door and slams it behind him and then she’s there, inches away from his face, shaking her head, speaking to him, but he can’t hear her.

Then, quick as a blink, she’s forcing something into his mouth and it’s like a shockwave straight to his brain and his surroundings come into focus. It’s still too much, but he can filter some of the information, understand it, and when he looks around, he sees 221B Baker Street and Jane and nothing else.

A few seconds later he bites down and registers ice and a part of his mind tries to explain what happened but it’s not quite there yet. He’s still breathing too hard, that much he’s sure of, and it’s making him dizzy.

At some point Jane seems satisfied and holds a cup out in front of him. He spits out the ice and all but melts into the chair, his head dropping back as he gulps some more air into his lungs. He’s still short circuiting but at least he knows he’s not dying. What was he panicking about to begin with?

His brain hasn’t fully reconnected with his body so he isn’t sure what happens when Jane leans over to look into his eyes and ask him a question. Or maybe just says something to him. He doesn’t know why her voice sounds like a foreign facsimile of English.

He doesn’t know why he pulls her down to him and captures her lips. He doesn’t know why he holds her so tightly to him or why she responds so easily or why the dizziness of his brain reacting to this is so different from needing air.

It’s like setting fire to the paper tower, clearing his mind, and when he realises what he’s doing, instead of pushing her away, he begs her to keep burning until every last piece is wiped from existence.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My work schedule has been a huge detriment to my posting speed and I'd like to thank you for your patience as I slowly trudge through. This one may be a bit underwhelming, but I have better things planned for later.

Muted blue-grey light comes through the window, hiding the sun and suggesting an impending thunderstorm. It feels early enough that it wouldn’t be a wasted day to get up now, but being in his own bed feels… right. It’s the first time in a while he’s felt right, waking up in the bed he knows, in the room he knows, thinking groggily that the past however many months have been a strange, time-skipping dream. He takes a deep breath to wake himself some more.

_No. Stop. Why doesn’t it smell right?_ This isn’t what his bed normally smells like. This smell is… familiar… but it’s a smell he knows from the times he’s slept at–

His stomach sinks as he opens his eyes and glances around the room, spotting the objects that don’t belong like a three-dimensional _I Spy_ book. And as he surfaces moment by moment, he remembers the day before and the weeks before and the months before and allows himself a brief lashing-out in the form of shoving his face into the pillow and screaming until he runs out of air.

He does drag himself out of bed and briefly wonders when he changed into pyjama bottoms. Yesterday’s clothes sit in a pile on the floor near the foot of the bed and he writes it off as exhausted forgetting. Not good for working, but then, nothing that happened yesterday was good for working.

He doesn’t feel remotely refreshed upon leaving the bathroom, even with the taste of sleep out of his mouth. It’s almost a mercy that Jane is in the kitchen already, leaning against the counter with a mug of tea.

“Want to tell me what happened yesterday?” she asks immediately, making no effort to mask how closely she’s watching him.

“What part?”

“Try all of them.”

Sherlock stares past her, making an uncomfortable effort to put his thoughts into words.

_When did it start?_ he prompts himself. “I was going too fast. I needed…” _No._ “I wanted a fix.” He looks to Jane for a reaction but she just nods for him to continue. He purses his lips and searches for another push. _Explain. But?_ “But I don’t have anyone to read my list.”

“What list?”

“I prefer to partake where no one can care about me. I make a list indicating how much of each ingredient I’ve mixed for when someone eventually finds me. But I don’t have anyone to look for me and read my list. So I came here. I think… I thought you could help.”

“Supervise?” Jane’s tone is sharp enough that Sherlock’s eyes flick back to her from where they drifted to look at nothing. He shakes his head and her guard doesn’t drop. “How much would you have done?”

Sherlock shrugs and the room feels a little colder for it. “Enough to forget about a lot of things for a while if I were to be careful. Possibly enough to overdose if I weren’t. Habituation is a fickle thing.”

The tension is visible on her, but Jane keeps her face cool and nods slowly. She lets the information sift for a minute before opening her mouth, pausing for thought before saying, “I told Jim what you told me about him before. He was a bit terrified when he came to pick up a hard drive a client wanted copied and got run out by a madman that looked like a friend of his.”

“I suppose in my… state… I wasn’t thinking straight.” He doesn’t mention how sure he was yesterday that he’d been face to face with the ghost of his Jim Moriarty. _Panic response needs some tweaking._ “Thank you for letting me stay.”

“I wasn’t sure if I should have.”

The silence that follows gets heavier by the second. She knows that he knows what she’s thinking and he knows he has no excuse for himself. So he bites it.

“I’m sorry. Please–”

“If you’re about to ask me to forgive your impropriety, don’t. I was the one in a coherent state, I should have stopped it.” Her cheeks pink slightly before she says, “Did it help?”

“I…” He takes the opportunity to dip into his mind palace and examine. The room he shut himself in yesterday is almost unfamiliar in how neat it is. A few papers stacked on the desk, pen and notepad off to the side. Is this where he was buried before? “Yes.”

“What about…”

He looks to her to continue, but her eyes flicker off to the side. He waits some more, but all he gets is a quick glance before she looks off into the background again.

“Stop it.”

“Hmm?”

“Stop it and ask your question. What about what?”

“You know what about what,” she sighs. “What about Molly? What about the other me you’ve been pining over since you got dropped here? What about the fact that you looked at me and saw her?”

“As if I could look at you and see her.”

“Oh, charming.”

“She has nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even with her when I left; I was too scared to get close enough.” To himself he mutters, “At least I let myself feel something about it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The challenge in her voice pushes him to snap back. “I’ve accepted that I’m stuck here. I may not be dealing with it well but _I am dealing_. This is where I exist now and I’ve lost everything I know and all the chances I could have taken for something to go right, but you! You’re all in denial, treating me like a scientific marvel and ignoring what’s right in front of you and that’s that _Will is dead_ and you’re just carrying on.”

“Do you expect us all to turn into sobbing heaps about it?”

“No! But I expect you to at least _acknowledge_ that you’ve lost someone you love!”

The way she hardens hits him right in the core as he thinks about being on the receiving end of such a remark. He’s been dead before, he’s lost before, but the only mourning he’s seen and experienced shouldn’t be all there is. She may be him, but just because she isn’t self-destructing doesn’t mean she’s not hurting. But he’s flown past that line. It’s too late to take it back if he wanted to.

And he really doesn’t want to, so he lets their _conversation_ follow its natural path into a useless shouting match. Such is the nature of their sparring. Mrs. Hudson would throw a fit if she were here, but she isn’t, because this is the world where things are better but completely wrong at the same time.

The argument, or whatever it is, comes to a halt when Sherlock’s wild gesticulation has him slapping the fridge door with the back of his hand, stunning himself at the unexpected spark of pain. Jane rolls her eyes at him as he massages his sore knuckles. The look they share is of annoyance and they both huff out a frustrated sigh before simultaneously muttering:

“Maybe he was right.”

Time stretches. The look they exchange at hearing the other speak the same words is indescribable to both. It contains thoughts and words and actions. A _Greg Lestrade is a bastard_ and a _This could be a terrible idea_ , but also a _what if_ and _maybe_ and a _why_ and a _why not_ all together.

There is a moment of understanding, a silent agreement. And in a fashion completely unlike they’ve done before, they collide.

* * *

“Doctor Scott.”

“Brad!” Will turns toward the voice, and upon seeing the three-piece suit and umbrella that’s definitely a weapon, his face drops into something that feels like a scowl. He much prefers receiving Mycroft’s messages through one of his interchangeable assistants, and the unreleased hairball version of his brother standing just inside the lab door is, Will thinks, one of the last things he could have wanted from a workday. “Oh. It’s you.”

“I believe the line is, ‘What are you doing here?’” Mycroft says, glancing around the half-lit lab with disinterest.

“You’d know,” Will replies bitterly. “What do you want?”

He didn’t mind this Mycroft at first, for all his bureaucracy and Big Brother threats, but being relegated to an alias even in private is miles worse than being Not Sherlock. This Mycroft has too long a stick up his arse for it to be worth bringing up, though, and as Mycroft hasn’t commented on his running tests with most of the lights off, Will doesn’t bother with anything that’ll keep his _brother_ here any longer than he needs to be.

“I came to discuss your upcoming visit.”

“What’s there to discuss?” A lot, he knows, but it’s been a long day and he just wants to finish his tasks and go to sleep so he can get up in the morning and visit their sister. Whom Mycroft never refers to by name or title outside his own office and Molly’s house.

“I’m afraid tomorrow is no longer available. I have upcoming dates for next week and the week after.”

_Not a chance_ , Will thinks. He’s been visiting Eurus once a week for months now – only one visit was cancelled due to a severe storm over the water, and even then he was able to go the next day – and he’s not about to let her go an extra week on her own in that glass box. He taught himself to knit so he could make her a blanket, for God’s sake. He’s not leaving her behind, and he says so.

“If I can’t get in tomorrow, give me Saturday,” he insists. “Sunday at the latest.”

“That won’t be possible.”

“Why not?”

“An incident has occurred.”

Will raises his eyebrows at Mycroft in an expression of _well, go on_. Mycroft seems satisfied with his answer for a long minute before realising Will won’t relent. “An episode,” he says vaguely.

“Well then,” Will says, pushing for annoying casualness as he tries not to imagine what she might have done to herself or someone else. “She’ll be needing some emotional support, won’t she.”

“I can’t risk–”

“You don’t care about risk. You care about control. I already know you’ll have put everything to making sure she can do as little as possible and you’re not going to extend that to me. Nine o’clock, like we planned.”

Mycroft’s face twists at being told what to do, and Will cannot care less how upset his brother is. He hopes Mycroft can see in his eyes that he’s willing to sic their parents on him, and Molly, and John, and anyone else who knows how committed he is to helping Eurus.

The laptop in front of him chimes to inform him of his latest test results. He shifts over to begin logging the information in his report. Ignoring Mycroft’s annoyed and annoying face is a bit of added fun.

“What are your intentions?” Big Brother asks after a stretch of silence.

“First I add these results to the documentation. Then I do a second edit for transcription. Molly will be in tonight and she’ll do the third and submit the full report.”

“Will you be serious?”

“I do be serious.”

While Mycroft fumes, Will saves the log and sets to cleaning up his station with practiced speed. With the laptop under his arm, he nudges his chair under the counter and walks directly into his brother’s space and glares at him. The bubble is one of the few things he knows to assault, and while he considers himself a nice person, he’s not above making Mycroft as uncomfortable as he makes everybody else.

“My Eurus is all about the science,” Will says quietly. “She isn’t afraid to push to get results. I don’t care what this one has done in her life; I’ll be more afraid of _my_ sister until given a reason to feel otherwise. And I’ll continue to be more afraid of my sister than I am of you.”

Only an inch taller, Mycroft looks down at Will with a new grimace at his circumference being invaded and his power being questioned. “I prefer dealing with Sherlock.”

“I’m sure you do. Excuse me.”

Will pushes past Mycroft and stalks to the office to finish his work. He texts Molly on the way to warn her of a possible visit slash threat, and focuses on getting through the rest of the day.


	11. Chapter 11

Will steps out of the pod-like lift and into the cave, blinking away the harsh lighting as he would in the morgue. He spots her lying on her bed with her hands folded over her stomach, unmoving like a corpse in a casket, and mentally slaps himself for making so many death comparisons in such a short time. The cushion he sits on on the floor is back on the chair nearest the exit and he picks it up and tosses it to its usual spot a foot away from the glass.

Eurus has been unpredictable lately, only getting out of bed when she feels like it. Today seems no different, so Will gets comfortable on the floor with the notebook on his crossed legs and a gallon jug of water beside him, and he waits for her. Last week he sat here almost half an hour before she came to him, so he’s prepared to be here as long as he needs to be. He flicks through the notebook, reminding himself of the items he added over the course of the last week to talk to her about. There’s a school presentation’s worth of notes on edible fungi that he added after falling down an internet rabbit hole about foraging one night when he couldn’t fall asleep. She’ll find the lion’s mane mushroom interesting at least, if only for how ugly it is.

It doesn’t take as long for her to get up this time. She wraps the big forest green blanket around herself and shuffles over, using it as a cushion when she sits on the other side of the glass. He politely ignores the still-pink line on her left arm, but she notices his diverted gaze and wraps the blanket tighter around herself. It’s enough to distract him with a small feeling of pride that she’s attached to it, despite the dropped stitches and simplicity of the thing. He wonders not for the first time how long it had been since anyone had given her something with any meaning.

“I keep thinking I should learn to play the violin,” is his opener. “It’s hard, though, isn’t it? I was never very good at reading music and I failed the one guitar course I took so I probably wouldn’t get much out of it. But I keep thinking about it anyway.”

And so he talks, and she watches him attentively, gracing him with a nod or a smile every so often. Her head tilts inquisitively when he gets to the mushrooms, and he has to pause to tell her she looks like a kitten. A gentle smile blooms on her face before she gestures for him to continue.

There’s time to spare in his scheduled block once he finishes talking, and for a while they just sit there. Her face is pensive, and when she drops the blanket from her shoulders and stands with a frown he jumps up and nearly tries to follow her. The glass continues to stop him from getting any closer, so he watches warily as Eurus crosses her cell and comes back carrying a violin. She looks pointedly at the cushion behind him and he accepts her suggestion, sitting back down and looking up at her as she plucks at her strings.

She plays for him for what feels like an eternity. It’s like she’s building the music as she goes, her face twitching with the emotions she’s feeding through the violin, and somehow there’s no end or beginning to any of it. He knows this must be how her mind works all the time, without breaks or diversions, forever focused but always moving.

It must be so exhausting.

He knows their visit is over when she cuts herself off abruptly and walks away from him. There’s a last bit of hope in him that she’s just tired of playing and will come sit with him again after she places the violin and bow on the table, but when she returns, she simply picks her blanket up off the floor and goes straight to her bed.

The lack of acknowledgement stings but he knows he can’t hold it against her, so he gives her a “Good night, I love you, I’ll be back” before tossing his cushion back to its chair and leaving her alone.

* * *

Showers are an interesting thing. Getting in is terrible, and getting out is terrible, but the sweet spot that is the shower could go on forever and never disappoint. The spray of hot water hitting all the tight muscles and sore spots is a delight, as is the feeling of being warm and clean and refreshed. She could stand here for hours with the water hitting just the right spot of her back to relax her shoulders and heat her entire body at the same time, if not for—

“Lestrade wants us.”

The door closes halfway through the sentence, trapping her in the room with him. Well, not _trapping_ her, but definitely putting an end to her wandering shower thoughts. _Sharing_ , she thinks. She would stay in here forever if not for the cruel necessity of sharing sometimes.

She’s finished anyway, so she turns the tap without grumbling and squeezes some water out of her hair. When she takes a step out of the tub to reach for her towel, he’s holding it out for her, and she accepts it with a muttered thanks and begins drying herself off.

Nudity has become meaningless and she’s used to the way his eyes move up and down her body. There are no tight movements for him to take note of this time, but he does wince at her legs, prompting her to look down at the light bruises on her thighs.

“Meh,” she says, carrying on. She looks him over quickly, appreciating the full view as much as she cares to, and briefly considers biting him next time he holds her too tight. “What’s the case?”

Sherlock’s shoulders rise and fall in a quick shrug. “He texted both of us an address. I was going to go home and come back but I can just as easily pretend I was already here to work.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. You know where everything is.”

He waits for her to fold her hair up into an old t-shirt before opening the door and letting her out.

The window in the bedroom is already open, letting in the air and noise of late spring in London. It’s mostly cleared out the faint scents of sex, but Jane still throws the blankets off the bed to make sure. The sound of the shower going back on wraps it all up in a boring white bow.

There’s something so anticlimactic about it all. Of course there were bound to be results of some kind, but did they have to be so… conclusive? It didn’t even make sense to act on that one stupid comment, and yet, somehow, it’s been working. It’s been _good_ , even. They care little enough for each other that it doesn’t mean anything, and while Jane has always prided herself on being a quick learner, Sherlock proved to be a _very_ quick learner.

And oh, has it ever been working. It’s worked well enough that it isn’t even a means of expelling the frustration they have with each other anymore. It was terrifying to step over that line, but it was like once they’d decided to vent their issues nonverbally, it left time to actually communicate.

It’s burned into her memory, that movement from using each other to sharing an activity. She’d been _thoroughly_ used that night and was enjoying feeling like a cooked noodle while almost craving a cigarette even though she’d quit smoking at twenty-three. Sherlock was on his side facing her, drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally humming or tapping a brief tune against the mattress. It was after an extended lack of sound that she turned her head to see him watching her intently.

“What?” she whispered, not wanting to break the comfortable silence that had settled over the room.

“I can hear you thinking,” he said, his tone giving no hint to his emotions. Not that he tended to emote much after anyway. His calm always bordered on blissful emptiness.

Jane turned to stare at the ceiling for a long minute. She’d always been comfortable with sex and sexuality, but Sherlock seemed rather detached from it all when they weren’t actively engaged. Not that that was a problem. This engagement was different, though, because they hadn’t fought or even disagreed beforehand; it was a successful case and their teamwork had been flawless and they’d hopped into bed anyway.

She didn’t know what to make of it and heard her mouth say, “Is this just something we do now?”

When she looked back at him his eyes were off her, unfocused. Retreated into his thoughts. She waited for him to resurface, and he said, “Do you want it to be?”

“Do you?” she deflected, knowing his answer would be a shrug. Another infinite instant passed and finally she said, “I suppose.”

They went for round two after that, testing the waters of the just-because, and decided it worked for them.

And so they continued. And now they’re something she doesn’t have a good term for because _fuckbuddy_ makes her want to vomit.

She texts Greg saying Sherlock will meet her at Baker Street and they’ll head over together.

* * *

The flickering within the chamber is a deep blue, the electric wisps dancing around the inside of the glass. It’s a personal favourite setting to dim the lights to half intensity and work with the currents swirling in his periphery, and it is unfortunately something he can only do when he is on the floor by himself, because Eurus insists on having the lights at maximum and Anthea can only be budged to eighty percent. Still, there are worse things, so Mycroft lets the lights stay up until he has sole control of the console.

The computer announces the end of its scan with another negative beep. With a sigh, Mycroft crosses off another line in his notebook and sets the parameters of the next test. Having to do these searches manually has taken up more time and paper than he would like, but the system carries on without a care for the humans in charge of it. All it sees is another drop zone checked, and onto the next.

There have been no matches for Sherlock’s signature in any of the zones they’ve searched, and while they know it’s unlikely he came from any world that has previously dropped its residents here, they ran out of ideas weeks ago and this is all they have left to try. It would be an impossible stroke of luck if he were to have a match already in the system; the fact of infinite universes makes the three-dozen pages of search parameters in his little notebook seem infinitesimally pointless. If nothing comes of them, square one will have remained unchanged, and they will be back with their useless circle: can’t send him back without knowing where he’s from, can’t know where he’s from without sending him back.

While Sherlock doesn’t seem particularly happy to be here, he does seem to have accepted the reality of things. And he does genuinely appear to care for the people here as permanent fixtures. As the eldest by a margin, Mycroft is used to Eurus spending time with their middle brother, so the time she spends with Sherlock is no strange thing to him. The consistency is a bit odd, but since he has no idea how Sherlock schedules the rest of his life, he can’t make any comments on his unfailingly taking Eurus out for lunch every single Saturday at precisely noon. He might like to be invited once, but he has the feeling Sherlock’s relationship with his own Mycroft is somewhat… tense.

But that isn’t important right now. He hits enter on the next sequence and lets the computer do its work. His eyes have stopped trying to catch the commands as they scroll past and instead he sits back and takes a sip of lukewarm coffee.

When the second fan in the computer kicks in, Mycroft glances at the screen to check for anything new and sees nothing out of the ordinary, but behind the monitor, the tendrils in the chamber begin flickering with more aggression than before. He pauses to highlight the current search in his notebook, and when he looks up again, the chamber is nearly glowing blue. A deep, electric hum builds in the center of the room where it sits, and the computer’s fans whir angrily as it scans. He can’t stop it while it runs, so instead he double checks that the chamber’s activity is still being visually recorded.

Then he hears the first icy crack of glass. He sees the line grow and split on the surface of the chamber, and in a flash of alarm, he kicks back his chair and drops behind his desk, facing the wall. His head has barely cleared the keyboard tray when the sound of thunder and shattering glass sends pieces of the chamber’s exterior sailing in all directions, the force throwing his monitor into the wall with larger chunks of glass embedding themselves around it before it falls. Angry electric blue tendrils thrash overhead for just a second before the room goes quiet, save for his gasping breaths, the slowing fans in the computer tower next to him, and the gentle rain of drywall falling from the ceiling. The only light left is from the tower, shielded from the blast by the thick wooden back of his desk.

In the dark, it beeps with a notification to the negative.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a half chapter because it's been excruciatingly difficult to write anything lately and I wanted you to have something. Please badger me on tumblr.

“Remind me what we’re doing,” she says. “Greg knows the deal’s happening, so why are we barging in first?”

“He certainly knows _some_ things are happening,” Sherlock mutters ahead of her.

“You’re the one who decided our thing is none of his business. His asking me to drinks–”

“Again.”

“–isn’t any of _yours_. Are you jealous because you didn’t get invited to something you were never going to attend or do you have a grownup reason?”

He rounds on her with a glare that barely stays on his face a second before she sees him realise she was right, and instead he purses his lips and nods.

“He hasn’t missed a meeting yet,” Sherlock explains. “He also hasn’t ever missed a darts tournament at his favourite pub in the eight years he’s frequented it. Both are scheduled for six, so this will be a chance to examine his prioritisation.”

“He could just say he’s going out for a cigarette and make the deal in the back alley.”

“That’s why this works. The police will be at his usual spot, where they expect him to show up, and we’re here where he _already_ is. One of us will be inside spectating the world’s least interesting sport–”

“Golf.”

“–while the other keeps watch outside. It’s a quiet night in a quiet area, so it shouldn’t be difficult to tell if his associate comes _here_ instead.”

“So I get to stand outside while you enjoy darts with the lads.”

Sherlock opens his mouth to reply and is interrupted by his ringing mobile. Jane gestures for him to get it and he frowns at the screen.

“What is it?”

“This Mycroft never talks if he has the thumbs to text,” Sherlock mumbles. He taps the answer button and brings the phone to his ear. She can’t hear what the elder Holmes is saying, but Sherlock’s frown doesn’t budge. “I’m working on something right now…. I’ll see what I can manage. Call you back.”

“Something wrong?”

“Sounds like it,” Sherlock says pensively.

“Go find out what’s happening.” As much as she wants to say this is all pointless anyway since the person they’re after isn’t even important in the grand scheme of things, she’s been a bit bored with her day since they wrapped up their case with the Yard. It doesn’t need to be a two-person job; the police want the sellers more than the buyers. And maybe she’ll have a drink while she’s there. “I’ll keep an eye on him and take notes. Meet me back at Baker Street when you’re done.”

Sherlock nods and dials back, stepping into the street to wave down a cab.

How he summons them out of thin air, she’ll never know.

* * *

_Transcribing_ _is like laundry. It’s only nice when you do your own_

_There’s an empty space on the wall, I think I could frame that_

_Do you think it would go over well? They wouldn’t have to know I did it_

He’s about to send another text when his phone begins to ring in his hand.

“Billy’s Butchery, you slice ’em, we dice ’em, this is Bonesaw speaking.”

“Long day?” Molly says with an audible grin.

“It wouldn’t feel so long if certain unnamed individuals didn’t need seconding on their own documentation.”

“At least you’re almost done!”

“Three-fourths through the day is hardly ‘almost done’. I’ll probably have a nap here before going home.” As if on command, Will breaks into a large yawn that almost hurts his face. “I don’t know why I feel more tired after a day of sitting and staring at a screen but I wish I didn’t.”

“Do you want me to bring you coffee on my way in?”

“No, it’s fine. This’ll be done by the time you get here if it kills me but I wouldn’t complain if you put a word in about it.”

“I’ll bring it up. See you in a couple hours.”

“Yeah.”

He sets his phone on the desk and glares at the transcript in front of him. _Can you really not understand your own words?_ he thinks at it, and when it doesn’t respond in the voice of anyone from yesterday’s afternoon shift, he sighs and goes back to work.

* * *

“Ohhh.”

Upon entering the large round room, Sherlock finds himself wishing he had asked what, precisely, the urgency was in having him come. He expected numbers and words and science he barely understands and is instead greeted by an utter warzone. While it may be his Mycroft’s style to call forth a minion to clean up his messes, this is… far too on point.

_What the hell happened in here?_ he thinks, treading cautiously and ultimately failing to avoid stepping on any glass. It’s a mess underfoot and everywhere else: glass chunks and powder on the floor and embedded in the walls; chairs, computers, and other equipment shoved back as if by a great force from the center of the room; and in the center of the room, the base of what used to be the large glass sphere with flickers of blue electricity living inside it.

It’s clear enough that the chamber is what caused the damage; what alarms him is how it could have happened. He’s learned enough about this place to know the same chamber has been in use for decades without requiring any sort of support or maintenance. There are only a few dozen others around the world, from what he understands, and the idea of such an important piece of technology being destroyed… There are only a handful of real crystal balls, and one has just shattered.

“Sherlock?” A head appears around the side of a desk at the opposite end of the room and Eurus narrows her eyes at him. “Were you invited?”

“Mycroft called me.” Sherlock picks his way across the room to where Eurus is crouched with a laptop connected to a computer tower that’s seen better days. “Is he alright?”

Eurus nods as she types something into the laptop and the tower’s fans begin to whir. There are two empty mugs under the desk, and Sherlock notes that they have been filled and refilled with tea.

“He’s downstairs gathering a maintenance team to help clean up. I’m checking the last server backup to make sure we haven’t lost any useful data.”

“How did this happen?” Sherlock examines the room, cataloguing the char, the glass, and the detritus. The ceiling above where the chamber used to be looks like the epicentre of a crack that will have no qualms causing more problems very soon.

“Don’t know yet.”

“It can’t be safe in here.”

“It isn’t. But there’s work to be done.”

He bites the inside of his cheek knowing he’d probably be doing the same in her place. Still, he doesn’t have to like his little sister being in any amount of danger even if the greater of it has already passed. “What can I do to help?”

“You don’t have to. I’m sure you have your own work to do.”

“Jane can handle her clients. Put me to work.”


End file.
